Teya & Salena represented Austria in Eurovision last year with “Who the Hell is Edgar?”, it was written from the perspective of wanting to be taken seriously in the industry, veiled through a fun song about being possessed by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe, though the bridge gets quite blatant and singles out Spotify for not paying its artists properly. It was one of the favourites in the Eurovision community last year and I think it would’ve done better had the Finland vs. Sweden rivalry not happened.

Some companies are alright with this but yeah there’s always a catch with Apple.

From the UK, the dark sky lasted longer than I thought.

Getting 404 on that link. 😩

Quod Libet was one I tried. Doesn’t quite scratch the itch MusicBee gives me, but still solid nonetheless. Tauon Music Box is a gorgeous looking player that’s similar.

I tried LM Studio since AMD advertised it for their GPUs. Once ROCm was installed my GPU was detected and I could use LLMs on that rather than on the CPU. I struggled to get it to work on Windows even when LM Studio was trying to do everything to get it to work.

When I’ve used it, gapless playback being non-existent due to it basically being a frontend to the web client/MusicKit for web. I listen to a lot of albums in full nowadays, so that can really hurt the experience. It’s a shame because everything else about it is great. I am aware that the Cider devs are trying to find ways of handling that without reliance on the web client/API, which might enable gapless but also stuff like lossless if you got AM for that.

Edit: I should mention that Cider has a new client that’s paid but still supports Linux (specifically with AppImage, .deb and .rpm packages), and my experience was with Cider Classic.

Edit 2: I bought Cider 2 and so far it’s working well. You sacrifice lossless and maybe some gapless playback still, but it’s a mild loss vs. so far a huge gain in usability.

I think a lot of people have a few killer apps that just don’t work on Linux even with WINE. Hell, I’ve heard that VR is not worth it on Linux. There are edge cases like that, that need to be sorted some way. Hopefully whatever Valve is doing wrt their supposed standalone VR headset helps there.

Tempted to throw Sam & Max on my iPad now…

MusicBee. Tried it on WINE. Not great. Linux players also don’t do a lot of what MusicBee does OOTB, and if they do it’s not as seamless as MusicBee. (tag hierarchies are the main thing, but the playlist functionality is also good.)

Thankfully it runs fine in a virtual machine.

Not to mention, Apple Music is so much better than Spotify for my needs and Cider isn’t cutting it for me right now. Once they’re not as reliant on MusicKit, I might give it a go again.

There’s still some stuff I’m tied to Windows for, namely music players (MusicBee and Apple Music but they can be used in a VM) and VR. But it’s nice to see Linux growing.

Judging from this, it seems that they have a path forward and Sony is likely going the direct connection route. If not, there’s always iVRy, whose job has probably gotten much easier now that Sony’s basically removed some of the barriers.

Surprising if they’re going the wired route. VirtualLink has been said to be a dead standard (Oculus pipes video to the headset even if it’s plugged in) and NVIDIA stopped supporting it. AMD might, I recall a tweet from iVRy stating that if you plug the PSVR2 into your AMD GPU and it boots into cinema mode, it should work normally through any future means. Prior to this an adapter was needed to emulate the special DisplayPort modes to enable VR mode, but now that adapter is no longer required on AMD GPUs (still required for NVIDIA).

In any case, I’m not complaining. Means I don’t have to shell out hundreds for a Quest anymore.

Honestly I love the Steam Deck for getting Linux into people’s hands in a way that’s easy and Just Works :tm:. They’ve not replaced the OS on their Steam Deck at all, which is a win not just for Valve but the Linux ecosystem as a whole.

Though, the only issue my friends has had is transferring files to and from the Steam Deck if their main PC runs Windows or Mac. There are a multitude of varyingly convenient options but all of my friends have literally just plugged an external hard drive through the sole USB-C port lol. Linux has to cater to people who won’t even install third-party drivers.

I was thinking on moving to Fedora, since it has more robust support for GUI-based installation through PackageKit and it’s got a more stable release cycle. But Arch and its wiki is just my bread and butter at this point that moving to another distro feels foreign and annoying in comparison, even though it’s not the distro’s fault.

What brand, if I can ask? Over in the UK I’ve only seen Dr. Pepper USA do cherry vanilla, which is different to Coca-Cola’s Dr. Pepper that uses aspartame and sugar. (US Dr. Pepper uses HFCS) UK Dr. Pepper was way too strong with the sugar but with the aspartame it just tastes watery and dead.

Zevia is quite tricky to get in the UK (not seeing any Vanilla Cola imported here) but if I see an opportunity to get it imported, I’ll go for it.

Tangentially related, Amazon has a lot of Green Cola, don’t know if that’s a brand people know or not but they claim to use stevia as well. Edit: Green Cola does contain sucralose so if you’re trying to skip that one too, keep that in mind.

Cherry vanilla? I thought that was American! Haven’t had it in a while since the importers don’t have 'em in stock.

Switched to Windows from Linux for a bit because I was having a few problems with Linux, but the main one is that seemingly, spotty 5Ghz connections cause iwlwifi to panic, which means no wifi. Windows does not have this problem. (relevant chip is the Intel AX210)

It’s annoying because the UX on KDE is objectively better than Windows and I don’t want to have to deal with slower connections because the wifi driver has a dumb bug, and reporting the bug to the LKML is something I do not have the knowledge to do.