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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2025

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  • I would love a good WYIWYG desktop screenwriting software.

    Writing fountain markup just doesn’t work for me. it’s hard to explain, and sounds precious, but if my brain is in markup mode it’s not in creative mode and vice versa.

    Some of the ok ones from the past have been abandoned.

    I bought a pro license of fade in which is supposed to be available for Linux but it won’t install and support didn’t solve it. So I have to work exclusively from my Windows machine… Which I don’t love doing.

    Linux is still a difficult environment for creative work.



  • I’m rabidly pro-consumer about most things but I struggle with how we define a market when we talk about steam. In order for steam to be a monopoly you have to drill down through super categories of software sales and then video game sales, to the platform level.

    If you look at all digital delivery video game sales they still don’t have a monopoly. You don’t have to deal with steam to play a video game. It’s only PC video game sales where they are close to a controlling market share.

    But Steam has far less power over PC gaming than Apple, Sony, or Nintendo do over their respective platforms. Gamers and Devs basically HAVE to deal with those companies to have access to their markets.






  • 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.



  • 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.