Zacktorial   Members

Huh, WinBoat looks pretty slick. It does seem to be a full (partial?) Windows install running in a VM, with all the pros and cons of that. I wonder how on earth they manage licensing... For those of us for whom installing MS software is a complete no-go, there are some alternatives to Windows-in-a-VM, and here in the year of our lord 2025 things run surprisingly smoothly. Might be worth trying out these solutions first. Everything is based on WINE, of course, which is a Windows API emulation layer. You can use WINE by itself like a neanderthal, but it's much easier with a nice frontend. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard good things about Bottles https://usebottles.com/ For games, the name of the game is proton, which is WINE + a DirectX translation layer. Again you can roll your own, but here you have a choice of a few frontends. If you're playing Steam games, just install Steam. Steam is Linux native and just works and so do 99% of games. By default Steam will only let you launch games that are "verified", but if you go to Settings -> Compatibility there is an option to enable Steam Play (what Valve has branded proton) for all titles. For some games you may or may not want to fiddle with running different the game with different versions of proton, but that is a game-specific setting. For non-steam games, first of all you can just add them as a Steam shortcut and run them that way. Works pretty great with things that are just distributed as a .exe inside a folder (I use it for Sonic fangames). But also, GoG, Epic, and Amazon storefronts have a frontend call Heroic Launcher which works incredibly well. It's how I played Baldur's Gate 3 and Witcher 3, both of which I have on GoG. There's also a miscellaneous game launcher called Lutris, but I haven't had much luck getting it to run anything successfully. In a certain sense that can never happen and in a certain sense it already has. We have to get our terminology straight a little. "Linux" the way we've been using it in this conversation is shorthand for a big glob of software, only one part is technically actually called "Linux". "Linux" is just the kernel of the OS, the very low-level part that talks to the hardware directly and provides APIs for applications to use computer resources (among other more technical duties like process scheduling and memory allocation). The rest of the OS is usually called "userland". Android is Linux in that it uses the Linux kernel, but the userland on top of Android is increasingly under Google's draconian control. They just announced new shenanigans about sideloading set to take place next year that people are actively protesting https://keepandroidopen.org/ In that sense, large companies have already taken over and displaced open-source software. Desktop Linux (what Stallman wants everyone to call GNU/Linux but that's also kind of not technically correct anymore) though has proven more resilient. Large corporations have tried shenanigans with desktop Linux, but every time they do, someone comes out of the woodwork and creates a new Linux distro without said shenanigans. A sort of "my own Linux, with blackjack and hookers" sort of strategy. The biggest threat to desktop Linux isn't so much corporate software meddling, but corporate hardware meddling. Microsoft continues to try to make Linux more and more difficult to install on your own hardware with "features" like Secure Boot. I worry that the almost-assuredly-impending mass migration to ARM-based PCs will be the opportunity that MS seizes to really lock down the hardware and make it impossible to install a non-Windows OS. (Even then there are companies like Raspberry Pi and Framework that will keep the torch going, but I worry that's not a self-sustaining ecosystem...)

So I'm a little ahead of the game on this, as I've been using Linux as my primary OS for about 20 years now. The good news is that switching to Linux has never been easier. There's never been more options for user-friendly distros, and almost everything just works now. For general Linux advice, almost any beginner distro will do. I would personally avoid Ubuntu (and its flavors, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc). Ubuntu derivatives are fine, but Ubuntu itself has a new package format (snap) that only it uses, and I've found it to be a bit janky. I would also avoid Arch and its derivatives because first of all Arch is not user friendly at all, and second, Arch updates tend to be pretty unstable. Updates are frequent and pretty bleeding edge and you can expect stuff to be janky or stop working over time. I think the current best beginner distros are PopOS, Mint, and MXLinux. Honorable mention for ElementaryOS. As for DAWs, for obvious reasons I only ever considered DAWs that run on Linux. I found Ardour to have too much of a learning curve and not enough documentation to surmount it. Audacity is easy enough to use, but pretty clunky and not really intended as a full DAW so much as feature-heavy audio file editing. Someone (I think Argle) brought Reaper to my attention. I tried it out, fell deeply, madly in love with it, and have been using it ever since. That said, I'm only using it to do podcast editing. The closest I get to actual music production is Furnace Tracker, which does run flawlessly in Linux. I'm sticking with Linux for the foreseeable future, but I do have a couple of caveats and quibbles with the modern state of Linux. I don't mean this as a discouragement, but just to temper expectations. Things are improving but not perfect in Linux right now. We are somewhere in the middle of a major infrastructure transition. Everything still works, but you might notice more little inconsistencies and bugs and jank than you would have even five years ago. Distros and desktop environments are moving towards making the newer Wayland windowing system the default instead of ye olde X11. Wayland is a much cleaner design than X11, but it is less mature and rougher around the edges. My experience using Wayland has been a desktop with annoying little bugs and bits of jank everywhere. Because of this, I still run X11, but I know someday I'll have to make the switch. Linux audio infrastructure is also a bit complex these days. Something called PipeWire has largely replaced the older PulseAudio and is backwards compatible with it. There is a similar story with PulseAudio and JACK. But if you need to do anything off the beaten path with audio at the moment, which I suspect a lot of us might, you will probably find yourself having to wrestle configs that have to mess with pulse and pipewire and JACK all at the same time. As for what made me switch? Windows Vista was waaaaaay too slow on the laptop I had 20 years ago.

I'm surprised how few tracks we have tagged with "lang-latin". Great track overall, this is now my preferred way to hear this theme.

Wow, these source tunes really work well together. This is practically seemless. If I didn't know both of the originals so well I wouldn't even know it was a mashup.

This is a great piece. I really love the use of Apollo 8 vocal samples. Although they had the chance here to use the best of the Apollo program's audio clips (the one about the turd) and chose not to.

I can't not hear "House of the Rising Sun" in this.

The vibe of this was sort of half way between Tears For Fears "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and Pink Floyd's "Animals" (any track, just pick one). Really enjoyed it.

Loved it. Loved how the original melody came back in kind of a creepy way to wrap up the remix.

I'd love to do interviews at some point, but until April I am pretty swamped at work, so I haven't been very proactive about setting something up. Yeah, it is purely random. Six random tracks on the main page, one of them randomly selected. No rhyme, reason, or pattern. It is a pretty great way to just play a song that I probably otherwise wouldn't.

Yep, monthly. I just finished writing February's episode and will be recording, editing, and hopefully releasing it next week. The roll of the die is just for fun. The Russian Remix Roulette has six songs, I have a six sided die, and ye olde OCR pod from over a decade ago did it, so I'm just keeping up the tradition.

Howdy, folks. You may recognize me as Zack! on the OC ReMix discord. I've been enjoying OCR since roughly 2002, and a few months ago I was reminiscing about the OCR podcast in its various incarnations and how much I missed them. I voiced this in the 25th birthday hangout, and @Liontamer encouraged me to get off my butt and just restart the pod. So I did. Check it out here: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2445308.rss Ad-free, not trying to make a single cent off of this, and I keep the language tame so that you can listen with kids if you want to. I'm very much an amateur at this, hoping to get better at it as I go. I learn a little more every recording and editing session, so fingers crossed a few more of these and thing will be half decent. If you're reading this, episode 2 is out, so go grab it if you're interested. I'm aware that a few of the voiceovers sound, well, awful. I had the wrong mic selected, didn't notice until edit time, and I have a cold now so my voice is all funny. I figure you guys can deal with a couple minutes of webcam mic. The format is roughly news, new remixes with my worthless commentary on them, some random segment that strokes my ego, and then one final Russian Remix Roulette track. I remember them rolling a die and playing a RRR track on the very first incarnation of the OCR pod, and I wanted to keep it going. Question for the powers that be: any objections to me using the OCR logo as the pod's thumbnail?