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whm1974
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 11:24 am

Vhalidictes wrote:
deruberhanyok wrote:
So your car example does a good job of illustrating my point - I guess what Linux distros need are sales guys willing to "sell" a free product and get nothing in return other than the satisfaction of knowing they helped someone learn a new thing. But Linux user communities are not those sales guys, and so desktop Linux will continue to be a niche thing.


You read my post correctly, yes. I think that Linux on the desktop is currently dead, mostly because MS killed it with Windows 10. Never underestimate free-as-in-beer. That alone determines whether Linux will ever have a Year.

Then again, stepping back a bit, it really doesn't matter. We're arguing about a OS as if the Desktop is the target use. That's like debating when OS/390 will have its year on the desktop.

Linux on the desktop is hardly dead, it is alive and well and growing.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 11:39 am

whm1974 wrote:
Linux on the desktop is hardly dead, it is alive and well and growing.


How can you even tell, though? We're all clearly sample-biased out of the wazoo.

Plus all the usage-shifts, like, I'm not even really sure what "Linux on the desktop" is competing with anymore.

I wonder about this a lot, but I just can't get a read on it enough to say.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 11:51 am

whm1974 wrote:
Linux on the desktop is hardly dead, it is alive and well and growing.

If by "growing" you mean "there are so many distros and DEs now it is impossible to keep track" I might agree. :wink: (But "fragmentation" is not the same thing as "growth".)

By most estimates they're still in the low single-digits for desktop OS market share. Desktop PC sales have been on a downward trend for several years, with the only growth segment being gaming PCs (which are less likely to run Linux, for obvious reasons). So Linux has a still-tiny slice of a shrinking market.
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whm1974
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 12:19 pm

just brew it! wrote:
whm1974 wrote:
Linux on the desktop is hardly dead, it is alive and well and growing.

If by "growing" you mean "there are so many distros now it is impossible to keep track" I might agree. :wink:

By most estimates they're still in the low single-digits for desktop OS market share. Desktop PC sales have been on a downward trend for several years, with the only growth segment being gaming PCs (which are less likely to run Linux, for obvious reasons). So Linux has a still-tiny slice of a shrinking market.

The desktop PC is hardly dead however. Yes sales are declining for various reasons such as people are keeping their systems longer, but those same people aren't throwing out their PCs for tablets and smartphones.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 12:28 pm

whm1974 wrote:
The desktop PC is hardly dead however. Yes sales are declining for various reasons such as people are keeping their systems longer, but those same people aren't throwing out their PCs for tablets and smartphones.

Dead, no, but its role in the daily life is declining as people increasingly use mobile devices to replace tasks that required a PC as recently as ten years ago. And among the younger generation, there's increasingly less reliance on any PC at all; they use them when needed and provided by someone else (e.g. work, school, library) but all of their online life aside from those specific cases is lived on a phone or tablet.
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 12:55 pm

whm1974 wrote:
The desktop PC is hardly dead however. Yes sales are declining for various reasons such as people are keeping their systems longer, but those same people aren't throwing out their PCs for tablets and smartphones.

No, they're just leaving them turned off for days at a stretch since they don't need them to read their e-mail, surf the web, or watch cat videos any more. Maybe they turn them on at tax time to use TurboTax, and once in a blue moon to look at those photos they archived to CD-R 15 years ago.

There are a lot of people like that, and they have very little motivation to learn how to download, install, and use a new desktop OS; their desktop PC simply isn't an important part of their life any more.
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 1:00 pm

Wow, four pages of fascinating thrust and parry. I was worried at first that it would quickly descend into that same old tiresome arguement that has been going on ever since a certain Finnish gentleman sat down to write his own kernel to run on his new toy. Windows vs Linux - Linux vs Windows...Been done to death.
However, I'm glad to say that I was partially wrong. Valid points have been raised, equally valid points have countered them. Still though, it always balances on the razor edge because the question at hand is impossible to properly answer. It's the same as asking "Which is easier to attend, Law school or Medical school?" Depends upon the student. And, in the case of this thread's question, depends upon the user and their needs and wants. It can't be quantified or qualified except on a personal level which is different in nearly every case. However, the Gerbils have still managed to make it fairly interesting, I salute them :D
Anyway just something I wanted to throw in there, We now return you to your previous programming already in progress...
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 1:44 pm

just brew it! wrote:
whm1974 wrote:
The desktop PC is hardly dead however. Yes sales are declining for various reasons such as people are keeping their systems longer, but those same people aren't throwing out their PCs for tablets and smartphones.

No, they're just leaving them turned off for days at a stretch since they don't need them to read their e-mail, surf the web, or watch cat videos any more. Maybe they turn them on at tax time to use TurboTax, and once in a blue moon to look at those photos they archived to CD-R 15 years ago.

...


Doubt they will be doing that because those 15 year old CDR likely can't be read anymore.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 1:56 pm

FWIW I had no problems reading a stack of nearly 200 DVD-Rs that were burned 10-15 years ago (raw rips of a substantial chunk of my music collection). I archived all of the raw WAVs off to DVD and kept only the MP3s on spinning media because the cost of HDD space to store the uncompressed rips was prohibitive back then. (Today, with cheaper HDDs and lossless FLAC compression, it makes sense to keep the lossless rips on a spinning HDD.)
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deruberhanyok
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 1:59 pm

whm1974 wrote:
Linux on the desktop is hardly dead, it is alive and well and growing.


This is a really optimistic take on it. Here's some stats:

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operatin ... pcustomd=0

It's gone down a little in the last four months but it's sitting at 2% right now, which I is about the same as last year but up from 1.5% in 2014/2015 and down a little from the end of last year. mac OS is sitting at around 5.5% for the latest three versions. Microsoft, even with making Windows 10 a free upgrade for as long as it did, is sitting with about 25%, and the old Windows 7 OS has nearly double that.

I don't think we'll see the 2% of "Linux" significantly increase simply due to the way Linux is distributed/developed. Microsoft has "Windows". Apple has "mac OS". Linux has... a thousand different flavors. You don't install Linux on a computer, you install Ubuntu, Fedora, whatever. They'd have to pick one to push above all others for marketshare to have a chance.

Also, there would have to be a "they" to make that push. Because right now the Fedora devs could come out and say "everyone should use Fedora, let's make that the standard" and then the Ubuntu guys will say the same thing, then the openSUSE team, etc, etc. (actually, I think this is how it's already done, which is why there are so many distros in the first place, everyone has a different idea of what direction desktop Linux should take, and the strength of being able to make that a reality is also a weakness).

Valve could make a push for SteamOS on PC-based gaming systems, and they sort of are doing that, and that could possibly increase the install base, but SteamOS isn't exactly a desktop operating system. Also... there isn't a need for it. Windows + Steam Big Picture mode is enough for most. There's a lot going against it, too. There are a lot of games, big hit games, that came out years ago that still aren't available on SteamOS/Linux, so if I want to play Skyrim, which was just a huge, wildly popular game, I have to do it in Windows. If I want to play World of Warcraft, I can't do it in Linux (well, I can, as long as I don't mind greatly decreased performance and the threat of having my account incorrectly detected as cheating and being permanently banned).

And even if all that were to happen, there'd have to be some need for it to get people to actively move away from Windows. You can make any number of arguments for the benefits of it over Windows, and I expect I would agree with a lot of them, but the key would be getting the "average user" to care. And for a lot of them it's just easier to buy an iPad or something.
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whm1974
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 2:57 pm

just brew it! wrote:
FWIW I had no problems reading a stack of nearly 200 DVD-Rs that were burned 10-15 years ago (raw rips of a substantial chunk of my music collection). I archived all of the raw WAVs off to DVD and kept only the MP3s on spinning media because the cost of HDD space to store the uncompressed rips was prohibitive back then. (Today, with cheaper HDDs and lossless FLAC compression, it makes sense to keep the lossless rips on a spinning HDD.)

So how much better does FLAC sound compared to MP3's?
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 3:28 pm

just brew it! wrote:
FWIW I had no problems reading a stack of nearly 200 DVD-Rs that were burned 10-15 years ago (raw rips of a substantial chunk of my music collection). I archived all of the raw WAVs off to DVD and kept only the MP3s on spinning media because the cost of HDD space to store the uncompressed rips was prohibitive back then. (Today, with cheaper HDDs and lossless FLAC compression, it makes sense to keep the lossless rips on a spinning HDD.)


Well look at you Mr. Fancy with your properly functioning optical media. Probably tie your shoes with ladder laces too.

whm1974 wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
FWIW I had no problems reading a stack of nearly 200 DVD-Rs that were burned 10-15 years ago (raw rips of a substantial chunk of my music collection). I archived all of the raw WAVs off to DVD and kept only the MP3s on spinning media because the cost of HDD space to store the uncompressed rips was prohibitive back then. (Today, with cheaper HDDs and lossless FLAC compression, it makes sense to keep the lossless rips on a spinning HDD.)

So how much better does FLAC sound compared to MP3's?


If you have good headphones, and a good soundcard, and the right song, a little bit better to a reasonable amount better than 320kbps vbr. Some people say it's night and day but I'd say it approaches the difference between Ultra and High in games. The biggest improvement in sound quality comes from your speakers/headphones. After that, your DSP. After that, your signal path and the environment it and the DSP exists. Then finally, whether or not you're lossless or very good lossy.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 3:36 pm

ludi wrote:
whm1974 wrote:
The desktop PC is hardly dead however. Yes sales are declining for various reasons such as people are keeping their systems longer, but those same people aren't throwing out their PCs for tablets and smartphones.

Dead, no, but its role in the daily life is declining as people increasingly use mobile devices to replace tasks that required a PC as recently as ten years ago. And among the younger generation, there's increasingly less reliance on any PC at all; they use them when needed and provided by someone else (e.g. work, school, library) but all of their online life aside from those specific cases is lived on a phone or tablet.


There's this here newfangled thing called ... what was it? Three-dee online gaming? I think some of the chillin' get into that sort of thing, but they ain't doin it on Android.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 3:38 pm

whm1974 wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
FWIW I had no problems reading a stack of nearly 200 DVD-Rs that were burned 10-15 years ago (raw rips of a substantial chunk of my music collection). I archived all of the raw WAVs off to DVD and kept only the MP3s on spinning media because the cost of HDD space to store the uncompressed rips was prohibitive back then. (Today, with cheaper HDDs and lossless FLAC compression, it makes sense to keep the lossless rips on a spinning HDD.)

So how much better does FLAC sound compared to MP3's?


How good is your audio setup?

It's a lot like bottlenecks in other things, like PC performance. Using FLAC files just moves the problem from being the source. Hint: The source is almost never a big problem in the first place.
 
deruberhanyok
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 4:30 pm

I mean, I don't want to get into an audio quality argument here, but I rip all of my audio in FLAC too. I keep it all on a Synology NAS and have it running a media server to stream to iTunes or Rhythmbox or other DAAP clients, or I can use a mapped network drive on my Windows system to play stuff in VLC or whatever.

It's not so much an "audio quality" thing - although I do run a S/PDIF optical cable directly into a pair of Edirol monitor speakers that sound very, very nice - but more of a convenience thing. I'm not concerned about hard drive space so much that I want to compress all the way to MP3, and my NAS can transcode to whatever supported format is required by the client device. And if for some reason I wanted to transcode the files later (for instance, to convert them to MP3 so I can play them on a car CD/MP3 player) I can do that too, but I'm always starting from a lossless format.

I could probably sit there and do A/B listening tests between different audio codecs and pick out which one is more compressed once it hits a certain bitrate (When I was younger I could pick out distortion in the 128kbps encoded stuff, so I always preferred 192kbps and above for files I was taking with me somewhere, no idea if my ears are still that good), but I remember the days when I was like "I should rip all my audio into WMA, oh wait, now I can play them in itunes, I should rip them all again to MP3, oh, I can rip them all to Ogg Vorbis... after the third time I decided to just go lossless and save myself future headache.

Vhalidictes wrote:
There's this here newfangled thing called ... what was it? Three-dee online gaming? I think some of the chillin' get into that sort of thing, but they ain't doin it on Android.


No, I expect a lot of them are doing it on Xbox One and PS4, though. It's cheaper than building a gaming PC and upgrading the video card every year.
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 4:47 pm

Vhalidictes wrote:
There's this here newfangled thing called ... what was it? Three-dee online gaming? I think some of the chillin' get into that sort of thing, but they ain't doin it on Android.

Say what, grandpa? You are technically correct (which is the best kind of correct), but only because the best games were developed first on iOS due to having a more consistent hardware platform to target...although Android is getting a pretty good selection these days, too. The best possible graphics experience is still on PC although the gap is gradually narrowing.
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 5:34 pm

deruberhanyok wrote:
And if for some reason I wanted to transcode the files later (for instance, to convert them to MP3 so I can play them on a car CD/MP3 player) I can do that too, but I'm always starting from a lossless format.


^ THIS. Always best to transcode from the original source and it's not like flac is that much different on disk space, as you previously said.

I remember the rule of thumb being a 1 minute of CD source is 10 megs, 320 bitrate mp3 being 3 megs and flac being like 6 megs.

So, yeah, it's roughly a factor of two from the lossy quality I would have kept otherwise. HDs are so big/cheap it's a no brainer.

I mean, what is that? Easily 5k CDs per $70 2 TiB HDD?
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 5:47 pm

Given the size/price ratio on today's HDs, I don't even bother with FLAC. Everything is encoded to WAV.

And yes, since y'all will ask, the nervosa brigade believes they can hear differences in playback between files that have always been WAV and on-the-fly FLAC conversions. Never done the test myself, but using WAV just makes things easier.
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Mon Mar 20, 2017 6:18 pm

whm1974 wrote:
So how much better does FLAC sound compared to MP3's?

TBH I can't tell the difference between lossless and a decent MP3/OGG encode most of the time. However, I had at some point started compressing to OGG instead, to save a little more space on my portable player. All of the older files were transcoded from WAV to MP3 to OGG because I was too lazy to reload all of the original WAV files. With the doubly transcoded files there were some occasional compression artifacts.

Last fall I bit the bullet and reloaded and re-encoded everything. So now I have a complete copy of the music library in both FLAC (for use on the home network) and OGG (for mobile) format. At least I had saved the rips to DVD-R, so I didn't need to dig hundreds of CDs out of the crawlspace and re-rip all of them.

fhohj wrote:
Well look at you Mr. Fancy with your properly functioning optical media. Probably tie your shoes with ladder laces too.

It ain't rocket science. Use a reputable brand of burner (I happen to like LG these days), don't buy crappy generic media, do a read-after-write verify pass to catch the occasional silently failed burn, and don't store the discs in the attic where they'll get alternately cooked and frozen with the seasons.

Captain Ned wrote:
Given the size/price ratio on today's HDs, I don't even bother with FLAC. Everything is encoded to WAV.

And yes, since y'all will ask, the nervosa brigade believes they can hear differences in playback between files that have always been WAV and on-the-fly FLAC conversions. Never done the test myself, but using WAV just makes things easier.

You need professional help. :wink:
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 1:56 am

whm1974 wrote:
Linux on the desktop is hardly dead, it is alive and well and growing.
Growing?

https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

Linux usage 2016:
Jan: 5.7%
Feb: 5.6%
Mar: 5.5%
Apr: 5.5%
May: 5.6%
Jun: 6.0%
Jul: 6.1%
Aug: 6.3%
Sep: 5.8%
Oct: 5.7%
Nov: 5.6%
Dec: 5.6%
Jan 2017: 5.7%
Feb 2017: 5.7%

Going down from 6.3% usage to 5.7% in 6 months time, and "growing" +/-0% in one year, I'd say its stunted growth is vertically challenged.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 3:17 am

boing wrote:
whm1974 wrote:
Linux on the desktop is hardly dead, it is alive and well and growing.
Growing?

https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

Linux usage 2016:
Jan: 5.7%
Feb: 5.6%
Mar: 5.5%
Apr: 5.5%
May: 5.6%
Jun: 6.0%
Jul: 6.1%
Aug: 6.3%
Sep: 5.8%
Oct: 5.7%
Nov: 5.6%
Dec: 5.6%
Jan 2017: 5.7%
Feb 2017: 5.7%

Going down from 6.3% usage to 5.7% in 6 months time, and "growing" +/-0% in one year, I'd say its stunted growth is vertically challenged.

Note that these are visitors to w3schools.com and vastly overrate the Linux figures (~1.5%?).

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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 3:59 am

Yeah, I doubt Linux has ever seen >5% usage on the desktop overall. 5% of all desktop machines on the web is a lot of machines.
Last edited by Redocbew on Tue Mar 21, 2017 4:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 3:59 am

Linux needs a better installation process. Sure, there are "download and play" repositories in various distros, but insofar as the non technical user is lost trying something as simple as installing an app outside of those repos, linux will not be perceived as more user friendly than windows. Let's not even mention drivers. Strides have been made, but it's still not near the user friendliness of windows.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 5:43 am

whm1974 wrote:
Linux on the desktop is hardly dead, it is alive and well and growing.

We probably have Google to thank for that.

As of January 2017 StatCounter said total Linux share of the Desktop OS segment at 2.32%, but an entire third of that (0.77%) was down to Chrome OS, with traditional Linux making up 1.55%.

One month later Feb 2017 and the stats are now traditional Linux at 1.53%, and ChromeOS at 0.83%. Total Linux 2.36%

So traditional distros are actually losing ground, even though Linux as a whole gains a little bit thanks to a strong performance from Chrome OS.

whm1974 wrote:
So how much better does FLAC sound compared to MP3's?

IMO the reason behind keeping FLAC isn't even about how it sounds, but because you want to have a pure version of the file that you can encode to whatever fancy compression algorithm comes along later on.

These days AAC works much better than mp3, so when I load files to my <<portable device>> I just transcode everything to .m4a before transferring. If I get a new device that runs better with Opus, then I can transcode to Opus. But if the library was already compressed to a lossy algorithm to begin with, then any further transcoding is out of the question as it won't be possible without damaging the content.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 6:39 am

jihadjoe wrote:
IMO the reason behind keeping FLAC isn't even about how it sounds, but because you want to have a pure version of the file that you can encode to whatever fancy compression algorithm comes along later on.

Yes, this. To most people on most equipment most of the time, it will be indistinguishable from a high bitrate MP3, OGG, or AAC file. But whenever you transcode from one lossy format to another, errors accumulate. When transcoding to a different (lossy) format, you really want to start from the original lossless source material if at all possible, to minimize these errors.

jihadjoe wrote:
These days AAC works much better than mp3, so when I load files to my <<portable device>> I just transcode everything to .m4a before transferring. If I get a new device that runs better with Opus, then I can transcode to Opus. But if the library was already compressed to a lossy algorithm to begin with, then any further transcoding is out of the question as it won't be possible without damaging the content.

Even modern MP3 encoders like LAME work better than MP3 of old. It's mostly about the quality of the perceptual coding model, which decides what gets kept and what gets thrown away based on what the model thinks you can and can't hear.

My own unscientific experiments from ~10 years ago convinced me that OGG needs about 75% of the bitrate of MP3 for subjectively equivalent fidelity. Pretty much everything supports FLAC and OGG these days, so when I did my mass re-encoding last fall I transcoded all of the old WAVs to FLAC (new CD rips are all done in FLAC from the start these days), and also generated 160 kbit OGG versions of everything for mobile use. I did not even bother with MP3 this time around.
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Vhalidictes
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:11 am

just brew it! wrote:
Yes, this. To most people on most equipment most of the time, it will be indistinguishable from a high bitrate MP3, OGG, or AAC file. But whenever you transcode from one lossy format to another, errors accumulate. When transcoding to a different (lossy) format, you really want to start from the original lossless source material if at all possible, to minimize these errors.


Help me out, JBI - I'm confused. "To most people on most equipment most of the time"?

FLAC is lossless. Under the assumption that you don't want to transcode from FLAC for some reason, you can always decompress it back to .WAV and lossy encode it from there. But why would you?
 
Glorious
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:37 am

Vhalidictes wrote:
Help me out, JBI - I'm confused. "To most people on most equipment most of the time"?

FLAC is lossless. Under the assumption that you don't want to transcode from FLAC for some reason, you can always decompress it back to .WAV and lossy encode it from there. But why would you?


He's saying that with the lossy formats he mentioned:

+with decent bitrate (like, idk, 192+)
+were encoded by a recent version of their encoder (unlike crude earlier ones with subjectively poorer psycho-acoustic models)

That they will be indistinguishable from flac (or decompressed WAV obviously, disregarding the mutterings of those who suffer from severe cases of audio nervosa)

UNLESS:

+The setup and listening situation is superb (i.e. -NOT- most equipment)
+The listener has good ears and experience (i.e. -NOT- most people, not even jbi anymore due to presbycusis )


Thus the reason to keep flac has to do with always transcoding from source, as opposed to chain-encoding lossy formats. Why? Because doing that several times can still lead to noticeable artifacts even if the bitrate remains the same.
 
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:46 am

Glorious nailed it.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
sophisticles
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 12:56 pm

Well, I read through almost all of the posts and here are some thoughts:

1) I am really shocked to see someone, who shall remain nameless, be pedantic and point out that "Linux" technically only refers to the kernel and not a complete OS. While it's true that "Linux" only literally refers to the kernel that Linus wrote, in the decades that have followed the term has come to apply to any open source OS that uses said kernel.

2) Re: GPU Drivers - I Honestly do not know what people are going on about; installing gpu drivers is "difficult" with Linux? They are unstable? Really? What distros are you guys using?

Here's my experience with drivers in general with both Windows and Linux over the years:

Windows was not necessarily easier to install drivers on, hardware makers actively made drivers for various Windows versions and then packaged them in an exe/msi and included them with hardware that they sold, so in that sense, yes, it was more convenient, easier if you will. BUT, I can't be the only one that has had a Windows install get screwed by a bad driver install, in fact if you will recall there were so many problems with gpu drivers causing BSOD's that MS changed the driver model with Vista so that a bad gpu driver could no longer hurt the whole system.

Modern day Linux distro nowadays, will automatically install the latest drivers, including gpu drivers, both Manjaro's and Ubuntu's driver managers will install open source and proprietary drivers for both AMD and Nvidia hardware, even GhostBSD installs Nvidia proprietary drivers automatically. It even allow the use of Nvidia's NVENC.

As for what's easier to configure, I find Manjaro, OpenSuse, and Ubuntu variants much easier to configure than Windows, Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 10 in particular I find to me a hot mess.

As for ease of use, my mom's pc bought the farm a few months back, which was an older system that ran Windows 7. I gave her one of my old laptops that was running LXLE until I could get her a new computer and she was able to dive right in and do what she wanted to do with no hand holding for me other giving her the password; she even asked me what version of Windows that was because it looked a bit different but she liked it.

I then bought her a cheap Dell with a quad core Pentium and Win10 and she complained about Win10 for days, demanding that I install "Windows" again; eventually she understood that Win10 was the latest Windows version and that in order for me to install Win7 on that system, I would need to buy a copy of Win7 for $150, find drivers for that system and that the Dell warranty would now be void.

For me, even if Windows 10 didn't have all those telemetry/spying issues and the new issues with ads being displayed within the OS, I still wouldn't use it, it's garbage, I find it clunky, weird, odd to configure, not to mention very limiting. Linux desktops have spoiled me with how customizable they are, the lack of need to go hunting for a driver cd to get my hardware working, the ability to easily create a ram drive and put the swap on said ram drive (btw, try this optimization, it works nicely) and the fact that it's legally free, I won't go back to Windows on my personal systems ever again.
 
Vhalidictes
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Re: Is Linux getting easier to use then Windows?

Tue Mar 21, 2017 1:05 pm

sophisticles wrote:
For me, even if Windows 10 didn't have all those telemetry/spying issues and the new issues with ads being displayed within the OS, I still wouldn't use it, it's garbage, I find it clunky, weird, odd to configure, not to mention very limiting. Linux desktops have spoiled me with how customizable they are, the lack of need to go hunting for a driver cd to get my hardware working, the ability to easily create a ram drive and put the swap on said ram drive (btw, try this optimization, it works nicely) and the fact that it's legally free, I won't go back to Windows on my personal systems ever again.


Your post is interesting because it doesn't match my experience at all.

1) "lack of need to go hunting for a driver CD" You don't use a modern video card, I take it. This is true (for the most part) for network cards, and only network cards, though.
2) Windows has a number of freeware RAM drive creators, I've used them before.
3) Windows 10, is, for the most part, legally free. Unless you don't have a Win7, Win8, or Win8.1 license lying around somewhere. They're quite common.
4) What does "it's garbage" mean, exactly?
5) What does "limiting" mean, exactly?

Once upon a time I saw a cool Linux "really heavy desktop UI" screenshot and decided that would be cool to replicate. I gave up because I was unable to find most of the options, or even what some of them were. I'm sure there's a way to make a video clip into a desktop background, but I wasn't able to find it back then. Tracking down various fonts was a joy, but at least it was possible to get most of them installed with some searching.
Last edited by Vhalidictes on Tue Mar 21, 2017 1:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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