It’s annoying that its driven by ad revenues, and made more dumb by the fact that if everyone can decode it, then they’re still advertising over sex and violence. So the whole endeavor is pointless.

But I don’t think it will cause any harm. Humans have been using slang, code, and memetic language to obscure meaning from others and identify their in-crowds since the dawn of human language. Some of it is dumber than others, but it won’t cause any harm.

Okay this is officially getting too goddamn pedantic for me. I will trust that you’re correct on all this.

That’s not an attack on ffmpeg. It’s 1,000% not fud. I’m not disputing its libre bonifides. H265 is not libre. It’s also not part of the ffmpeg code. But they can be distributed together because it’s non-commercial.

My apologies if I worded something in a way that wasn’t clear about that.

Separate from that issue.

There are distros that do not want to incorporate any non-libre elements into their OS for ideological reasons. They won’t have h265.

Then there are distros that have commercial elements, or for which their parent company has some kind of commercial interest in the distribution. If they don’t want to pay for licensing they may have legal limitations on their ability to incorporate h265.

But any completely non-commercial software that wants to bundle h265 in has cart blanche to do so.

I hope that clears things up.

H.265 is royalty free for non-commercial use. It’s ownership is kind of complicated with a bunch of patents and it is commercial licensing is controlled by a few groups.

If I understand correctly (and I’m no lawyer) FFMPEG is completely non-commercial so they don’t have an issue. Although I think anyone using FFMPEG for commercial applications (streamers, professional productions, etc…) should be paying a license.

I guess some distros felt that was legally murky for them and others aren’t comfortable with non-libre software.

I really wish Fedora would figure out a legal workaround and bundle in the codecs, but for now I just have to remember to set it up before I add any media.

H.265 is a pretty major one. E-AC-3 for audio. Ideally, for a desktop user, you want to be able to play anything. So you need know if your distro includes those codecs. Then how to install them if it doesn’t. Then you need to delete your thumbnail cache to fix the thumbnails.

It’s not hard. You just have to know that that’s a task you need to do. Coming from windows, a user is likely to just assume linux doesn’t support video properly and it’s thumbnails are broken.

Little quality of life stuff.

• How to install video codecs
• How to get thumbnails working in the file manager.
• Adding cloud storage to the file manager.
• How to make libre office save files with MS office filetypes by default (depending on work / school requirements)
• Maybe samba shares if they have another computer in the house.

For truly casual users (grandma or a student taking notes) there isn’t a lot to learn. Here’s your browser, here’s your office apps, this is like “notepad”. This is the software center for updates or any other applications, press the “windows key” to get your menu.

Came here to say drive letters. That’s a weird one for converts. A guide for noobies should explain that drive is mounted somewhere in the file structure. Cover how to find it, and how to mount it where you want.

“We” the collective population will never admit that. We were raised to believe that we are the good guys and the benchmark of freedom. Tyranny is something done by other people, different people, who aren’t good like us.

So when 1,200 detainees disappear from one of our concentration camps, “we” can just tell ourselves they were probably JUST deported without due process. Or maybe it’s just burocratic handoffs without a transparent paper trail. Surely none of them died in custody… We’re all sure of that… Right?

That’d be great. The cop’s body cam footage would be FOIA’d in a heartbeat.

Also, every minute they’re explaining to the cops who they are is a minute they’re not causing havoc in the community.

Fair. I think most people start with the assumption that users are coming from a workflow they preferred in the first place.

Out of curiosity, if you hate Aqua, why did you get a Mac? Is it an industry thing or a specific software?

I’d say Mint or Fedora KDE for windows converts. They’re both good “just works” options, but KDE just by virtue of being more popular has excellent software and support that make it a great option.

Fedora w/ Gnome for Mac converts is a no brainer, and I’d add that you’re probably going to want the Dash2Dock Lite or Dash2Dock Animated extension for a Mac convert.

From a user perspective I don’t understand how wasting a bunch of screen space on an ugly, non-functional bar across every window is better. I get that from a software development perspective it’s basically one less thing to deal with. But I absolutely prefer to have a functional use for the space.

The title bars in KDE felt so antiquated, especially for such a foundational thing. For a while I removed the title bars and used a “move window” key and minimize/maximize/close shortcuts.

Eventually I just switched to Gnome.