Today, I got a request from a family member to create a DVD, from several short videos of him playing on the guitar. I figure this shouldn’t be a big deal, but I was incorrect. Apparently, authoring DVDs is a giant pain in the ass—at least with the media I was given. All of these clips were in some strange AVI formatted video, which was massive, and didn’t even want to play properly in some media programs. I imagine the best course of action would be to just re-encode this mess, maybe into MP4 with ffmpeg, and just be done with it, especially as I wasn’t confident it’d fit on the DVD without modification. Okay, so let’s hop into the terminal and get ffmpeg installed. What’s even nicer about this, is it’s very easy to just open a terminal right in the directory, and modify my existing scripts. I probably should just make my batch files bash ones instead sometime, but whatever, it’s running! Nice and simple—or so I thought—as when I checked the converted output, the audio just became a wall of white noise.

Okay great, something must be wrong with the GNU/Linux installation...I guess? I try I few different encoding and re-encoding settings, they all fail the same way, I decide this isn’t my project anyway, and just boot back into Windows. I run ffmpeg again, it still fails miserably; honestly, that’s a huge relief. The files are just awful, thank god it’s not an OS related issue. This is where I find out some video programs fail to play it, and that Audacity imports the track as white noise too. Lovely, so how the heck will I be able to cut and convert this stuff into a proper format then? Strangely enough, it was Microsoft’s proprietary video clip tool that actually managed to do it, after messing with it a bit to make it think the entire video was a clip to convert. I have no idea why that worked, but oh well, at least I can use some free DVD authoring software. This isn’t really related to GNU/Linux any further, but let’s just say this was an absolute nightmare, and it took five burns to get a single usable configuration. It was like a balancing act of preserving re-encoding failures and successes, along with DVD commands which I guess weren’t added by default.

Okay, shows over, back to Pop!_OS, that’s the point of this, after all! Well actually, wait, since I’m here, now would be a great time to export my MusicBee ratings into a simple playlist format like .m3u. After that, I could look for a proper music app for my new system! I got my playlists ready, so it’s time to jump back in. Now I’m looking for something free and open source, something which has automatic playlists for ratings, the ability to rate music, and ideally has some customization features. Looking around online, it seems like the most popular one that fits this bill is Clementine. Oddly, they seemingly haven’t had an official release for several years, despite very recent active work in the GitHub repository. Not really sure what’s up with that, but I could grab some prerelease installation if necessary.

I do see a flatpak from not too long ago on the Pop shop, and figure that should be more than enough to evaluate if it will work for me. It can recognize my library no problem, though tag embedded ratings seem to differ from MusicBee, which is fine, as I could simply import the playlists...right? Well no, they just don’t function properly at all. This is a problem, .m3u files are pretty basic, it’s literally just directories isn’t it? I took some random album, saved an .m3u playlist in Clementine, and well—it’s a mess. There’s so much extra baggage saved here, which would make conversion unreasonable between what I have from MusicBee, and this. It’s a pretty big deal, and unfortunately a deal breaker, but I did see a fork of Clementine with far more recent releases from this month! It’s called Strawberry, and little did I know, it would actually bridge the gap I needed, saving the day.

Strawberry is similar as you might imagine; it feels a little nicer, and has some extra features, but otherwise I figured this might be pointless. My thought was maybe the .m3u playlists would differ, because the info preserved in Clementine was pretty needless. To my actual shock, the Hail Mary I wagered was dead on. The playlists here and from MusicBee are identical, aside from a single line at the top for external directories, #EXTM3U, which is trivial to append. Now we’re getting to business, so I alter the directories to match my new drives, import the playlist, and...there are broken entries. Thankfully, I pick up almost immediately what happened, but unfortunately there’s no automated way to resolve the conflict. The problem is that MusicBee isn’t case sensitive, while Strawberry is, so any song I updated capitalization for in the folder structure, never updated the data within MusicBee. This seems like a Strawberry oversight more than anything, but whatever, I can deal with this type of problem.

I pop open the native text editor, and get to work replacing capitalization for a number of songs, in literally every rating playlist. After deleting and importing a couple times, all of the errors are resolved, I can select all, and then set every single song’s rating to the correct value! Fantastic stuff, and then I can make auto playlists if I need to export the data in the future. It took a number of hours, but thousands of entries are all imported, meaning my local favorites and rated tracks are all ready to go now! This is extremely important, because it means I can now ditch my Windows music collection, and progress it entirely with free software utilizing GNU/Linux. I do have some issues to resolve, mainly revolving around other satellite tools and tagging, but at the very least, the biggest hurdle has been crossed! Also—added bonus—my FiiO hardware works better than it did before. It has special modes for higher res audio playbacks (e.g. 24bit / 96khz), which never worked in Windows, but are plug and play here. I found this out by listening to a recent album I got called Jet Flight, and seeing the green color I should when such audio is passed through the DAC.

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.

You know, it’s been a few days since I’ve installed this system, and I only just now realized something: hibernation actually works on my device perfectly. I always, and I mean always, have issues with hibernation on my desktop Windows systems. Clearly it works for a lot of people— because I don’t hear about this being an issue—but for me, across multiple versions and computers, hibernation breaks. I’ve always opted to either leave my stuff running, or turn it off entirely, because I will basically have to restart the device anyway if I try to use hibernation mode. On Pop!_OS though? Oh wow, it works flawlessly, boots back up in a few seconds, and everything is just excellent; I am honestly stunned.

I figured I’d have to disable it, but it’s worked properly a few times already, and it’s just everything I could ever hope for. Also, can I talk to you about my lord and savior: integrated dark mode? Holy hell, everything is dark, and it is amazing. I was waiting for literally over a decade just for partial integration of dark mode into native Windows apps. I cannot stress enough how much I love this. Everything integrated is dark, everything I download is dark—I am in heaven.

Alright, so I downloaded OBS a couple days ago, right? There’s another bit of hardware I need to set up: my AVerMedia capture card. Let’s plug that bad boy in and set up a scene. Oh wait, nothing is detected; I suppose I need some drivers or something. Let’s do some digging! Several minutes of digging later and...well, shit. This hardware company gives no fucks about GNU/Linux systems, and also has some proprietary nonsense going on I guess. Only lead I have is a GitHub project which is years out of production, that modifies a specific no longer hosted driver, that is related, but not actually for the 4k card I purchased. Okay, let’s check the repository—oh, no releases. I guess I could follow the compilation instructions, it says it should just work. Shocker to no one, the years out of date un-compiled code failed to build, seemingly citing several unaccounted for variables (not missing dependencies).

It did say if it fails to try the Fedora branch. Alright, I’m on Ubuntu, but what the heck, ./build.sh go ahead and make my day. Oh, never mind, it already broke. I’m not in a position to resolve whatever issues these are, and a slightly less out of date fork mentioning kernel changes, makes me even more wary. I’m in way over my head here. For completion sake, I download the fork and see if it compiles, though alas, it also fails. But hey, I tried dang it, that accounts for something right? Man, this card was like $150, I guess I’ll just have to look for something that actually respects my freedom in the future. Considering it was plug and play with Windows though, I’m honestly surprised this was my first hardware casualty. More unconventional stuff I literally had to download drivers for works out of the box, but this was a bridge too far. Honestly, much better this than my audio gear; I’m happy, all things considered.

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.

After taking a bit of a break to just watch some videos, and get more comfy with the environment, I figured it was time to get back into it. First off, I still have absolutely no idea if my webcam will work. With no built in way to check, I figure some software off the Pop Shop would work just fine. Grab some program literally just called Camera, which seemed simple enough, but couldn’t recognize the device; no idea why. Maybe it’s expecting a different type of equipment, but regardless, there are other options. Perhaps I needed some controller application first—like the proprietary Logitech software on Windows—but obviously something free instead. Quickly found Cameractris, which was exactly what I was looking for, and it absolutely recognized my camera! The other Camera app still couldn’t, so I also found Webcamoid...but the package release was from 2016. Alright, well clearly there’s something else up here.

I head over to Github, and find the project does prebuilt releases behind a tiny paywall. Could try my hand at compiling, but I still have no idea what I’m doing. Frankly, neither that, nor sending off my credit card information for something I’ve never used, feels particularly great right now. So, I decide I may as well try out the ancient package, see if it works at all, and if so, if it’s at all useful first. I download it, and it does indeed recognize the webcam, and take pictures! Though, in that moment, I had a pretty obvious reminder that Open Broadcaster Software exists, and I use it rather regularly. Download that, works like a charm instantly, and it has many other uses for local recordings too! Also, now seems like a good time to get dedicated audio editing software, and as I know Audacity had that buyout a while back, I figure now’s a great time to check out Tenacity! No sense in sticking around on my final 2.X version, when I can grab that right this second after all! Boot it up, recording works great, and that’s another problem solved!

Perhaps now it’s time for something more personal: let’s finally change my desktop background! Yeah, I’m gonna throw my Foxfire art on one monitor, and some fan art a super kind person recently made of him on the other monitor! Oh wait, what? I can’t have a unique background for each monitor, seriously‽ Of all the things to have a snag on, this is certainly not one of them I was expecting. It’s really not that big of a deal, but at the same time it was driving me a bit crazy; like, surely I was doing something wrong—right? Well, actually no; after some digging, I find that by default, you legitimately cannot do this action. I checked the System76 FAQ, and did find some info on theme customization through GNOME Tweaks, but it didn’t seem like it covered unique monitor backgrounds. Thankfully, the years old Reddit comment search result history gods provided me with the sweet nectar of a solution...kind of.

I install GNOME Tweaks, and while it has no multi image support, you can set a home and lock screen background with different fit options. For whatever reason, changing the image did nothing, and altering the fit options of the lock screen, changed the fit options of the desktop. Okay, whatever, it was stated it wasn’t exactly supported in System76’s documentation; I can still work with this! The image that comment had showed a spanned fit, which, okay wow, my Foxfire is a WIDE boy now. Excellent, so all I have to do to have two images on my monitors is: create a single image. Straightforward, except the fan art one is not 1920x1080 like the other background. So, it’s time to open Krita, and scale it down so it’s exactly that, for parity with the other image in a 3840x1080 frame. Quick math has that at 72%, so I transform it, save the thing, set it as a background, hit span and—it works! Ah, first world problems, but I solved it!

“Dual monitor backgrounds in Pop!_OS”

Also, as an aside, I love the built in email app Geary. God, it’s so simple and sleek, literally exactly what I need, and nothing more. I was rocking Thunderbird for Windows recently since, well, Mozilla and free software, but I might honestly just stick with Geary on GNU/Linux. Not only that but, wow, the integration if you allow it. You can straight up integrate anything from Google you want, most notable is direct connection to Google drive from within the file explorer. I know I really shouldn’t be excited about proprietary connections, and I didn’t enable anything outside of drive mounting, but it’s just really cool how responsive it is. I still unfortunately use Google drive a lot, and this is legitimately a better way to access it than through Google itself. No extra non-free nonsense needed, aside from the servers themselves, which I’ll accept for now. Only issue seems to be that clicking links in emails takes a long time to open in Firefox. No clue why—it’s not Firefox itself—I can literally copy and paste the link, and load the page instantly; an odd little caveat.

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.

My initial thoughts about switching, was that it would be a bit over my head until I changed my hardware. I have some atypical peripherals, but my biggest concern was my NVIDIA graphics card. I had heard that this was a company notorious for being unfriendly with GNU/Linux development, and that people have problems using their components. I had my heart set on some hypothetical time in the future, where I’d get a new PC with AMD components, and hop to GNU/Linux Mint Debian Edition. I started looking into a distribution I heard about called Pop!_OS however, because it seemed like it might be possible for me to install it easily on my current system, without modification. It’s based on Ubuntu—which I had heard rather mixed things about—but it seemed to deviate a bit in certain places, like utilizing flatpak containers, and having its own shop. I heard Snap was bad I guess; also, proprietary? To reiterate, I have no idea what I’m doing. Anyway, the most important thing, is that this OS has a compiled bundle of proprietary NVIDIA drivers directly in the ISO. I’m not exactly thrilled by the prospect of running to non-free software to get my free software running, but surely some binary blobs are way farther up the freedom ladder, than sitting around twiddling my thumbs on Windows 10 forever. So I decide this is my calling; let’s get it going—today.

Alright, instructions seem simple enough; just download the OS, some free software to create a live disk (balenaEtcher), and reboot to freedom. The first steps did work out that way; popped out my favorite 16gb stick, let Etcher do its thing, and then went to reset the PC. After some silliness with my bios settings, I get to the install screen. Oh man is it slow. I chalk it up to the fact it’s on a USB stick, and just vibe for a bit chugging through the install wizard. Finally, the time comes when it asks me if I want to do a normal or custom install, and of course I want to do a custom one, because I’m a very cool guy. The reality is, I wasn’t in the mood to format one of my storage drives to install a small operating system. I figured I’d simply make a 250GB partition on a drive that Windows wasn’t on, and call it a day. I’ve heard trying to install on the same drive as an existing operating system can cause problems, and Windows could just mess with the boot table which, well—that doesn’t sound like a fun time.

I’m told to make a /home/ directory, which defaults to formatting as...EXT4? Can’t say I’ve ever formatted as anything beyond FAT32 or NTFS before, and I don’t really know if it will be cross compatible, but I suppose that doesn’t matter much. The goal is really just to have a partition large enough to install applications, and handle temporary files. My personal data will be on all my other drives anyway, to prevent issues. Okay, so great! I make the partition, I ask it to use it, I get the option to start the install, and then...it fails, after some files try to copy over. I try again, it fails, and again, then reboot the thing—no dice. Okay, well maybe if I look at the very scary typical clean install button (please don’t format my personal files, god there surely has to be multiple confirmations right) something will come up. It does give me a lead though, all my SSDs are over 2TBs, and apparently that’s a problem. If I try to work around it by mounting them, I get a no object for D-Bus interface error.

Alright, well I at least have some text I can copy, and I figure something out! Apparently, I need to utilize a mode called UEFI in my bios settings, in order to install on drives over 2TB, instead of legacy boot options. I hop into the settings, see a way to force UEFI only and think, “yeah that’s a great idea, let’s close compatibility so it has to go through UEFI,” except now my USB stick isn’t detected at all anymore. Well, crap. Okay, maybe I should grab my more recent 64GB one, which I know is USB 3, and surely should go into forced UEFI no problem right? Boot back into Windows, reopen Etcher, nuke the drive, and get it going, and it is going! Things load up, screen flashed once—oh, back to the command line. Pop!_OS instance 5 initiated, instance 20, 45, 70, 100...okay, I think the routine is busted here.

Ctrl+Alt+Del—oh, it fails far before there now despite being a live cd, then again, so I power down the whole thing. Guess something failed with the Etching software? Regardless, I put my settings to on instead of forced, and re-enable some unrelated legacy things. Maybe if the other drives worked properly, I could salvage something. Maybe install somewhere else and move it later? I dunno. But now it decides there are two boot options for the drive, where one is actually UEFI! Okay great, it’s running! Oh god, the command line is huge now, but I’m in, and I can mount the drives! So anyway, back to custom, and I realize something absurd must’ve happened. In tinkering with the on and off boxes for trying to install the OS, I think I must‘ve managed to idiot savant my way through some fail safe. Apparently, I need to at minimum have two partitions for my install, a, /home/, and a /boot/. I make the second partition, I define them as the partitions to use, and timidly hit the install button expecting failure. Installation...successful! Well holy hell, let’s get this show on the road then!

I restart, I have my boot configured incorrectly so it immediately threw me into Windows, I restart again and use the boot menu—ah two Pop!_OS choices! No, I don’t mean one from the stick, they’re both on the drive, but one says UEFI, so I wager it’s just different compatibility for booting? Had enough trouble with not using UEFI, we’re clicking the UEFI version. Wow, that boots fast, very sleek! Now comes my next biggest fear: not having any ability to use my audio equipment. It’s been suspiciously quiet through the entire install, but in actuality, there really were just no sounds playing at all. Sure enough I head to the sounds and, well actually, how the heck do I even change audio devices? Apparently, it’s in a settings context menu; fair enough, and all my devices are surprisingly just already there.

Main speakers, check; external DAC/amp, check. My XLR USB mic input I had to install drivers on Windows for? Yup, working out of the box. Huge weight off my chest there, as that stuff was not cheap, and I use it very often. Next hurdle: I need my VPN. Technically, I could scrap my current VPN provider if I had to, but they have done very well by me with their old lifetime plan, so I’d vastly prefer to keep them. I figured considering it’s a no logs VPN service, that a GNU/Linux package would be far more likely than an average proprietary service. I was right, though it was on their website, as opposed to in Pop’s special store. Easy install, quick to connect and—actually, wow, that connection was way faster than I’m used to. It usually takes like several seconds, yet this gets it done in less than one. Double checked the IPs on web searches because it was so fast, but it’s totally working as expected. Again, another good sized hurdle taken care of rather easily.

Okay, so now I need to resolve the issue of password management. I know there are a number of free software projects based around KeePass, so I’m expecting such a project to exist for GNU/Linux. KeePassXC comes to my rescue on the shop, it works excellently, and now I can begin logging into all of my web services and extensions I need on Firefox. Services are going well, everything seems fine, even watched some videos for good measure! I checked out my files, everything seems good, though I’m not the biggest fan of having to mount my internal SSDs every time I boot my PC, and them being icons on my task bar. Speaking of that taskbar, it’s kind of a big boy, so I guess I should fiddle with the settings. Turns out it’s very configurable; I was going to do a full tiny bar, but then I realized I can hide the taskbar on hover, and went back to the rounded floating one at a small size. Finally, screen real estate is mine again! I can also have it on both monitors, yes please, and it’s very snappy. Now there’s just one more thing to do before I call it a day, I gotta open the terminal and do that thing. All the cool kids show off their operating system with that built in program neofetch! Oh wait, it’s not built in? I just thought because well...okay, I guess it’s not like I can’t just sudo apt get neofetch. Oh hey there we go, it worked! Alright, time to take a screenshot!

“Baby's first Neofetch.”

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.

Preface I’ve been sent on a journey since the middle of 2023, that has entirely turned my Internet and software habits on their head. My perception of using large, proprietary providers of any service, went from complacent and unquestionably necessary, to incredibly hesitant, and begging for serviceable alternatives. As I sought out more free and open source applications, replaced the proprietary software I could, and began using and financially supporting federated Activity-pub servers, there was still an elephant in the room: Windows. The very operating system I used every single day—for everything—is entirely proprietary.

Windows is non-free software, which is what my entire life’s understanding of computing and compatible software is based upon. From when I first navigated through Windows ME at home as a small child, to 2000 and XP in schools for computer classes, Vista and 7 at home in my teens, and 10 for the last several years too. This is all to say that I have absolutely zero experience with any GNU/Linux platform, and trying to make a switch that actually mattered seemed very daunting. I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m not exactly adept at coding either. I’m just a man with the ability to web search, open to some change, and a desire to push through some friction. With that said, this will act as a diary for various days I work on my transition to a freer operating system. Observations, successes, failures, frustrations—all the sort of fun that comes from the voyage.

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.