merthyr1831
Also… hello! My first post on Lemmy. Which is very cool all things considered. What Reddit should’ve been.
ZorinOS or Linux Mint. Both are rock solid and very friendly to windows users :)
Rarbg is a PITA with its random rate limiting. I wish they’d let me sign up and get an API key (Even if that meant paying for it) because I’d rather have rarbg than rely on whatever arse trackers I have the time and energy to sign up for.
I know people say “oh just get private trackers” but it’s so much effort, especially when my piracy philosophy is that it should be as painless as possible to access content. I just want to get a tracker’s info, add it to Prowlarr, and start downloading. The requirement of posting and becoming a community member when I deal with my seedbox/prowlarr setup once every couple of months (if that) is far too labour-intensive imo.
<rant> Honestly, and I don’t mean this to hate on either software as I used both a lot before I discovered piracy on Windows: the quality of GIMP and Inkscape is well below most competing FOSS projects, let alone their proprietary challengers.
GIMP is powerful, but might as well be declared abandoned with how they’ve been preparing to port it to GTK 3 for a decade. It has some great features being held back by poor hardware acceleration and falling behind features provided even by alternatives like Photopea. It’s the X11 of photo editors.
Inkscape is okay, but the workflow stinks. BoxySVG is comparatively much more intuitive if it wasn’t lacking in a bunch of features. Inkscape has also basically been abandoned imo, with the project still not managing to get Apple M1 support working on the latest MacOS for nearly a year.
The barrier to contribute to either project is also sky-high imo, with their insistence on using C for cross=platform, front end applications. Normally this wouldn’t be a massive deal but it’s one of the key reasons I think Photopea and other proprietary freeware apps are running circles on these two projects - The turnaround for features and UX is so much better with modern languages. </rant>
Nothing wrong with how the leeching system works on privates. I quite like it, in fact. It’s just that private trackers are very often a “who you know” kind of affair and that requires sitting in IRC, forums etc. which is something I can’t justify doing on the random chance I spot a tracker doing signups.
Any private trackers that do have open signups seem to have too few users to keep new content coming through at a decent pace. I use DigitalCore, for example, and a lot of their content is just nonexistent compared to RarBG (RIP) with less seeders on anything that isn’t brand new, and the only new stuff is usually concentrated on stuff already seeded ad nauseam on public trackers.
It’s a shame RarBG went kaput because their system was fine… when it worked.
Small desktop apps are absolutely fine in Flutter. For your use case I can’t imagine there being much problem, beyond connecting to the databases youre using to pull data. You might have to write the API client yourself if it’s not a relatively new database server.
I’d say have a go with it. The basics are similar to TKinter and the UI is a lot nicer by default. You’ll also find it super easy to run on desktop and web - quite literally just changing what the target is and it’ll work out of the box (until you start relying on platform-specific features or packages).
GIMP is beyond stale and it’s frustrating to see people recommend it as an “alternative” to Photoshop when it’s about as actively developed as X11. The fact it’s making rounds on FOSS news channels/sites because they ported the UI to GTK 3 (Which was replaced by GTK4 3 years ago now) is really a sign of how bad the project has gotten.
Photopea is a near feature-for-feature clone of Photoshop, designed around the superior UX and UI of photoshop, and all within a webapp that leverages hardware acceleration. All done by a single person. The downside is that it’s a proprietary webapp that costs money to use without ads clogging half the screen.
And you know what? I STILL prefer Photopea to GIMP, after using the latter for years. GIMP is old, slow, and pretty much dead in the water and I’m certain that they’d have produced 3.0 faster if someone had rewritten it over a weekend instead of trying to port the godawful mess of tech debt that must be going on inside the GIMP project atm.-
Photoshop getting better support via WINE/Proton is more likely than GIMP ever returning to its hay-day of being a true competitor to PS.
