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Latest Comments by randyl
Soldak Entertainment formally announce Drox Operative 2, a starship action RPG
8 May 2020 at 5:19 pm UTC

I've tried to play Drox a couple times now and it didn't click. I'll try it again sometime soon. It looks like it would be my jam, but for some reason I don't get any traction with it.

Valve adds a 'Play Next' shelf in Steam to remind you of all those games you've never played
8 May 2020 at 5:16 pm UTC

I like the new library a lot. It has made organizing and categorizing games so much easier for me. I make dynamic categories and as long as every game is assigned at least one category, I'm good.

The new Play Next shelf is pretty cool. I'm curious how it recommends next titles. A Steam event last year had users play their oldest purchased title with no hours on it. I enjoyed that twist.

Software news: Inkscape finally hits 1.0 and Krita 4.3.0 gets a first Beta
7 May 2020 at 7:17 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: wvstolzing
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: tuubiSimple merging and page shuffling you can achieve easily with pdfshuffler. It has no editing features, but it does what it says on the tin and it does it intuitively. Just drag and drop files and pages, then save the result.
Thank you so much! That's going to be very handy. I just went to install it, turns out my distro has it already installed and I never noticed the thing.
For those who wonder: At least Debian has replaced it by the fork "pdfarranger" (but has a compatibility package with the old name).
Debian also has pdftk, which used to be the go-to tool on the CLI for pdf shuffling needs (it's in java, so I *guess* it would be a bit faster than pdfarranger, which seems to be in python?). Fedora has 'pdf-stapler', which is also in python, which got introduced because pdftk stopped building on Fedora for some reason. That's what I've been using for merging/shuffling.

There's another java program with a nice GUI: https://pdfsam.org/ [External Link]
another one (free as in beer) that comes with a GUI: https://code-industry.net/free-pdf-editor/ [External Link]

-- what I'd *love to* know, though, is whether there exists a program that can edit logical page numbers on pdfs. Adobe Acrobat seems to be the *only* one capable of doing this *without breaking the pdf*. I have the final pre-CC version in a windoze VM (which I have to confess I'm glad I bought, on a really good student discount back in the day), which I hate to have to launch every time I have to fix the pagination on a pdf.

I mean, you'd think that it would be an easy task; but given the horribly convoluted data structures inside a pdf, even *finding* where the pagination info is, & changing turns into some kind of precision surgery. I've used a python library that claims to be able to do this (pylabels); but it keeps breaking the files, to the point that they can't be opened.
There are a lot PDF tools available. Finding the right one for your workflow, platform, and language can be tricky. I convert and merge a lot of images and documents to PDF for work. Sometimes I get to use Linux, but mostly Windows. I still choose programs that work on both platforms though.

I think PDFTK hasn't seen any development effort in quite a while and no one is maintaining the fedora port. If this is the project I'm thinking of compile dependencies rely on out of date libs. It does do well when doing things like merging pdfs, but there are other tools I prefer now.

In Fedora sudo dnf install pdf-tools installs poppler-utils pdfunite, pdfsuffle, etc. These are pretty good for simple merges. I haven't used them as much as pdftk, nconvert, or wkhtmltopdf. There is also Pandoc as an option.

XnView/nconvert is available across distros and platforms. This is one of my favorite utilities. It's not open source, but it does offer Linux native apps. I use this most because it's one of the most powerful options available on Windows, especially for images. It's fast and business licensing options are cheap It's free for personal use.

ImageMagick is available for image to PDF conversion. I use this as well, but it's not as performant as NConvert is for me.

If you are interested in something like Acrobat, there is Master PDF Editor [External Link] for Linux. There is a free lite version. The license is $70 for the full version. A little spendy, but not compared to Acrobat. I use this to fill in PDFs with forms and sign them. edit: I missed you linked this when I saw pdfsam.

Regarding Krita, Gimp, and Adobe
For me Krita is good enough to do simple image manipulation. I don't open Gimp often, but it's there for whenI need it and mostly for digital photos. Adobe doesn't really offer me anything over Inkscape. I use Inkscape and Krita together with a better workflow (for me) and less hassle and much less expense than Adobe. Adobe is fine, but not worth the price at all to me.

Software news: Inkscape finally hits 1.0 and Krita 4.3.0 gets a first Beta
5 May 2020 at 6:16 pm UTC

I've been following Inkscape since I first started using Linux around 2004. It's come so far and it feels good to see it hit 1.0. Krita has been my favorite image editor for a long time. It's so easy to use and powerful. I have an ancient Wacom CTE-440 and it works great with Krita.

Adventure RPG 'Driftmoon' gains an Enchanted Edition update with Linux support
4 May 2020 at 7:24 pm UTC

I like this game a lot. I'm glad there is some additional content and a Linux client. The original Windows version ran really well through Proton. I reinstalled it for another play through. I never found all 100 silver feathers and there are a few areas I'm looking forward to tackling again.

Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution Fedora 32 released
29 Apr 2020 at 6:19 am UTC

My upgrade went well. I like to use the dnf-plugin method through the terminal. It lets me check and resolve issues with some of my custom software installs before upgrading. The entire upgrade (and a reboot) took about 20 minutes, including my rsync backup first.

Open source PS4 Remote Play client 'Chiaki' major release up with VA-API support
27 Apr 2020 at 10:21 pm UTC

Quoting: Xaero_VincentChiaki is pretty cool. Before it, I used the official Sony PS4 Remote Play client in a Windows VM in VMware on Linux and it worked almost as well.

Sadly, my PS4 in the bonus room can only connect via 2.4 GHz WiFi and the experience of the stream over that is very poor. Lots of glitching and artifacts and video stream / input lag and it's even worse if I connect it thru my range extender that adds latency.

Maybe I should invest in a Powerline Ethernet adapter or something?
I tried Chiaki last year and it worked pretty good. It was a little rough, but I could play most games well enough. It really is a cool utility and very easy to configure. Except for the DS4 touchpad, the controller worked great. I think the biggest drawback I remember is that my PS4 is wireless and I would also get artifacts, stuttering, and some input lag. I would definitely recommend PS4 owners give it a try.

Legendary is an in-development community-made open source version of the Epic Games Store
27 Apr 2020 at 8:41 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: Xaero_VincentNot very useful IMO since EGS only serves Windows / Mac games and Wine is still needed anyway. Might as well just use the full EGS client. GOG Galaxy makes more sense since the store offer Linux games but not a Linux client.
Depends on your viewpoint. Running an entire client in Wine can be messy, especially through updates and so on. An actual cross-platform client that's open source and available for the platform can have plenty of advantages.
This is my thought as well.

Installing EGS in WINE has drawbacks right now. Either you need to use the same prefix for all games, which doesn't work well in larger libraries, or install EGS into as many prefixes as separate game installs require. The big drawback here is that they look like separate client installs to Epic. It's just messier, and more likely to trigger anti DRM or suspicious account activity.

If this program works like GameHub or Lutris, we will only need to authenticate once and each game could have its own prefix, or share prefixes with similarly configured games.

Lenovo are to start shipping Fedora Linux as an option on their ThinkPad laptops
25 Apr 2020 at 6:01 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: TheSHEEEPWhy Fedora, though?
I mean, nothing against Fedora, but wouldn't Ubuntu generally result in a better experience for users due to more widespread support of pretty much anything?
There's a ton of stuff readily available for Ubuntu (or rather, as .deb) which is not impossible to get on Fedora but you have to jump through some hoops.
Installing apps and libraries on Fedora is as easy as any other disto. Enabling RPMFusion is like enabling "Universe" on Ubuntu or the AUR on Arch, which isn't complicated at all. It's just a repo. I use it for Nvidia drivers and Steam.

A better user experience is highly subjective. That's why so many distros are represented here. For me, Fedora is a great distro because it's close to upstream so I get a more vanilla experience that lets me customize my desktop how I like. Packages are up to date and fresh, but the system is stable. I use my desktop for work and gaming so it needs to be stable and rock solid that gets out of my way. Since Thinkpads are targeted at power users, Fedora is a good fit for that.

The important point, to me, is that another Linux distribution is being offered as an OS choice by major hardware manufacturers.

Linux game launcher 'GameHub' has a brand new release, with game tweaking support
24 Apr 2020 at 3:59 am UTC

Quoting: fleskI use GameHub on my NUC, and I think it's a pretty neat piece of software. I don't use Wine for games anyway, so it alreade had pretty much all the features I need. It has a good filtering and search options, so it's easy to find a game I want to install or play from any of the stores it integrates with.

Itch support also works well in my testing, though it requires you to copy an API key from the website into the GameHub config, so it's not as streamlined as the other integrations. It also enables you to filter by platform, something the Itch client itself does not do.
Game Hub wanted me to install the Itch client which I don't mind, but was a bit surprised about the requirement. Game Hub handled the situation really well though. It asked me to install Itch and restart Game Hub. It worked as expected which is always satisfying in that scenario.

Thanks for confirming the API process with Itch. I haven't done that yet. I suppose it works the same way for SteamGridDB and IGDB?

One of the features I like about Game Hub is how powerful the configurators are. On the other hand there is a learning curve. I need to become familiar with it. For now I'm still more comfortable configuring through the terminal.