Spectacle8011

I'm just quoting the Free Software Foundation themselves. I didn't say I agree with them. It's a deceptive use of language that is rather unbecoming of an organization normally so careful with its words.

Edit: For the record, I think the GNU Project's biggest contributions have been to the desktop, not the server world.

They do say that:

Usually combined with the kernel Linux, GNU forms the backbone of the Internet and powers millions of servers, desktops, and embedded computing devices.

The gaming performance issues you were facing might be related to Vulkan support for the card, if it works better on Windows, as apparently Kepler cards don't have great support for Vulkan: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=273935

I see Vulkan 1.2 is actually the latest version of Vulkan that supported Kepler architecture GPUs like the GT 730, which stopped receiving non-security updates after October 2021: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5202/~/support-plan-for-kepler-series-geforce-gpus-for-desktop

On Windows, games probably used OpenGL. If you were playing games with Proton, it prefers DXVK because it offers better compatibility and performance than wined3d's OpenGL translation layer. DXVK 2.0 and onwards have used Vulkan 1.3, which requires a GPU newer than yours. I don't know whether Steam (and Proton 8+) falls back to using DXVK 1.10 or falls back to OpenGL/wined3d.

Either way, that means you haven't been getting the latest performance improvement updates in DXVK since late 2022. So force-enabling wined3d's OpenGL translation layer with PROTON_USE_WINED3D might help, if it's not doing that already? I don't know if OpenGL would actually perform better, so this is kind of a long shot...

If you were playing Native GNU/Linux games, it might be different.

I second the openSUSE recommendation. My brief experience with it was really nice.

Edit: Ah, I see you've quit gaming, lol. Well, either way, if you use Wine with DXVK, maybe the above will help.

I keep wanting to buy it because of the amazing sales pitch, except it provides zero value to me. I already use my laptop in bed, lol... and if I'm going outside, I'm not going to be playing games. It doesn't even make sense to pack for going overseas because my laptop works great for that. And it doesn't work very well as a new computer because it's likely far more underpowered than my other computers for video editing and other work I need to do, but is nonetheless a cool feature.

Not that it matters at all. Valve still don't sell it in my country.

Ah, I see. I only used it once, so it's not something I do often, but it worked perfectly for me as a client to a Windows computer.

You won’t get anything as useful as RDP or plain old Teamviewer

Is there something I'm missing? Teamviewer is available for Linux and I've done remote support with it: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/linux/

I...assume it also works as the machine being remoted into?

All in all, having AV1 support heavily benefits the open source community, as AV1 itself is an open source codec. This means that AV1 has a royalty-free licensing model that makes it suitable for adoption in various open source projects. It was also designed to solve long-standing patent litigation issues that were common in other codecs in the industry.

It was certainly designed that way. However, Sisvel believes that AV1 uses patented technology in the specification. Sisvel announced this one year after the AV1 standard was finalized, and not during the three years the standard was being developed. Of course, patent holders can't be expected to deeply investigate every new technology that's coming out on the market...but this was the largest new technology, formed by a coalition of some of the biggest companies in the world deliberately designed to get away from patent-licensing organisations like MPEG LA, under development for 3 years. Read into Sisvel (and its member companies) motivations as you will.

Nonetheless, Unified Patents is hard at work challenging invalid AV1 patents, among others:

• https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2023/8/25/gevc-patent-in-sisvel-av1-pool-appears-not-essential
• https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2023/7/12/kaist-etri-av1hevc-patent-patent-japanese-opposition-success
• https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2023/7/7/interdigital-av1vp9-patent-japanese-opposition-success
• https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2023/7/7/two-xylene-jp-patents-revoked-in-japan
• https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2023/6/15/interdigital-sisvels-av1-pool-us-9675556

Don't know who Unified Patents is?

Unified is a 350+ international membership organization that seeks to improve patent quality and deter unsubstantiated or invalid patent assertions in defined technology sectors (Zones) through its activities. Should Unified determine that its goals can be better served by settling a post-grant challenge (or agreeing to never file any challenges), Unified will consider settling in exchange for a license, though never for money. As with all aspects of its challenges, Unified acts independently when settling, and never provides members with advance notice of negotiations, draft settlement agreements, or actual settlement.

They also do...prior art competitions?

Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on three patents owned by Speir Technologies, an Atlantic IP Services subsidiary.

We would also like to thank the dozens of other high-quality submissions that were made on this patent. The ongoing contests are open to anyone, and include tens of thousands of dollars in rewards available for helping the industry to challenge NPE patents of questionable validity by finding and submitting prior art in the contests. Visit PATROLL today to learn more about how to participate.

In other news, more than half of the H.264 patents have expired, and all the essential ones will be expired by 2027.

Seriously though, a stable API is not the GTK/GNOME developers’ agenda here. Nobody wanting a stable API should write software with this toolkit.

This blog post doesn't mention GTK, but I've heard GTK will sometimes implement breaking changes in minor version bumps. I was thinking about writing some software with GTK, and I haven't been deterred so I guess I'll learn the hard way, but has GTK 4 had any of these stability problems yet?

I think Krita is a more viable competitor to Photoshop than Gimp at this point… It’s also great for pen tablet drawing and arguably superior in that category.

Absolutely agree it's there for artists. Krita is a very successful project and I hear mainstream artists talk about it often, while not being an artist myself. Well, technically I own a Cintiq...

I haven't been able to get it to work well with PSDs, though, and I find the interface clunky for the sort of image editing I'm doing. I find GIMP easy enough to use, but it unfortunately lacks some crucial features. 3.0 is right around the corner (for real this time), so I'm hopeful. Unfortunately, PSD is a must because of collaboration. GIMP's ingest of PSD is better. But Krita does have non-destructive effects.

What I'm really hoping for is Affinity Photo to work well in Wine. Most people can get it running now but I think it's a little buggy or lacking in performance. I'll have to give that a shot soon.

But yeah, video editors are lacking. Kden live is ok (and awesome for the price)

As it so happens, I've thought about this a lot.

Kdenlive is definitely the best free software option but the lack of hardware accelerated playback really kills it dead in the water for me. I'm hoping it will improve soon, given the success of the fundraiser. DaVinci Resolve is fantastic but needing to transcode footage if you have H.264/AAC source footage (geh, I know, but some of us do) and being stuck with H.264 hardware encode in the best-case scenario is not great. I found Lightworks was the best option in terms of professional features + workflow. Proprietary, but hey, at least it works really well on Linux.

Audio editors are behind too. Audacity is pretty good for 2 track. Bitwig is a great multitrack alternative to Ableton… But Ardour isn’t developed enough for a pro studio and I’ve never seen one that uses Linux. Part of this is poor support for vst plugins developed for Windows, mostly due to their copy protection.

That's a shame to hear! I don't work with audio on a very professional level, so Audacity is fine for my use cases. It's improved in a significant way since the Muse Group acquisition (mainly non-destructive editing, but plenty of other stuff). I'm also annoyed but unsurprised to hear that DRM has thwarted compatibility yet again.

There are also Windows users who rely on niche business applications. Wine isn't great for that sort of software yet. Another big one is the creative industry. While the VFX industry is very Linux-focused, and 3D is very viable, other parts of video production are not. And GIMP needs non-destructive editing before it can even think of competing with Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Inkscape is a viable vector image tool. The many other Adobe programs don't have great alternatives, and if you need to collaborate, that means you all need to switch to a new program. Then there are the retraining costs to consider.

Gamers have the easiest time in switching to Linux. The amount of compromises and sacrifices you need to make in other industries are much greater right now.

However, Adobe is trying to bring some of their programs, like Photoshop, to the web. It's unlikely we'll see stuff like After Effects on the web, but Photoshop, Illustrator, maybe even inDesign could possibly, maybe be there in a few years. Photoshop web is already in beta (though it's garbage). The web continues to be the great equalizer.

I don’t know if they’re still 720p locked on the free version.

Yes, it's still locked to 720p on the free version, but the Create plan is very competitive at $9.99 a month. It has all of the features of Pro except encoding is limited to H.264/AAC and AV1 on Vimeo/YouTube, and you have no control over the encode aside from resolution. That was enough for me, though. I'm not doing anything super professional but I'm doing more than you can do easily with most of the NLEs on the list above.

I’ve tried LW before but I never really liked the workflow.

The workflow kind of broke my brain when I first looked at it a few years back but after acclimating to it I quite like it. The cutting is keyboard-based in a way most other NLEs aren't, but yeah, it can definitely be annoying without some tweaks. Were you using Lightworks when they didn't have a Fixed Layout option? The Flexible Layout pretty much leaves you to it, but the Fixed Layout is very reminiscent of Resolve. What I love most about Lightworks is definitely the speed. It's the fastest and most responsive NLE I've ever used (Cinelerra probably comes a close second). And it gives you good Color tools and many other powerful features! Not a common combination. The community is also full of knowledgeable people, but that's true of Resolve too.

Anyway, if you're happy with Resolve, there's no reason to consider switching. Pricing wise Resolve beats out Lightworks after two years of Pro license ownership and the licenses are less annoying. Main reason I went for Lightworks is I didn't want to be forced to keep a NVIDIA GPU forever. It seems less disruptive to my workflow in the long run. How is Resolve stability-wise for you? I'm still trialing Lightworks but the ownership cost is leading me to re-consider Resolve...

Having a look at the Resolve 18 Codec manual, I see they've moved from CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 8.6. I'm glad they didn't kill the GNU/Linux version or something along with CentOS, lol...

I like Kdenlive and used it for a few months, but I also really like Lightworks. Lightworks is proprietary, but it's also a professional tool. Unlike DaVinci Resolve, it will decode and encode H.264/AAC, and most people don't need much more than that, though AV1 is also supported. The color correction tools in Lightworks are better than Kdenlive's and the cutting tools, while they take a while to get used to, are quite nice when paired with they keyboard. Best of all, Lightworks is a lot faster to startup, doesn't crash as easily and it's always responsive.

The most annoying part has to be dealing with licenses. If you use up your two licenses, you need to contact their support via email to shuffle them around. It's a great program, but this is super annoying. It also discourages you from purchasing the perpetual license because you don't want to get stuck in this situation. Mind you, their support is very friendly so I have no doubt they'd help you out, but it's an issue of needing to ask them in the first place. DaVinci Resolve's licensing system at least works perfectly fine, no matter what, or so I've heard. If you activate a new computer, it will just deactivate an old installation, and that's it. No need to wrangle customer support while everyone's on holiday...

The other professional option on GNU/Linux is DaVinci Resolve.

DaVinci Resolve is a very nice NLE at a very nice price, though proprietary. But $500 is a lot better than the $800,000 it used to cost. Annoying to install although fat-tire's containerization project is worth a look for easy installation. However, it doesn't work for my source footage, even with Studio. The free version doesn't support H.264 decode/encode or AAC decode/encode, which are the two main codecs you'll see with MP4, the most ubiquitous (and patent-encumbered) video format in the world. The Studio version supports H.264 decode/encode only with NVIDIA GPUs, but it still doesn't support AAC decode/encode. It can encode H.264 though, which will leave you with an MP4 file with no audio track.

To use DaVinci Resolve with H.264/AAC in a livable way, you need a NVIDIA GPU, you need to purchase the Studio edition, and you need to transcode your audio from AAC to something Resolve can ingest. There are scripts to automate this. Optionally, you should also purchase a third-party AAC encoder plugin for Resolve so you don't need to transcode again after rendering, assuming you're targeting H.264/AAC on render. If you're not, you can just render to Quicktime/PCM .mov.

As much as I love DaVinci Resolve, I kind of didn't think that was worth it for me at the time so I went with Lightworks which supports H.264/AAC encode fine with their Free/Paid licenses. I think I'll come back to DaVinci Resolve after 2028, when the patents for H.264 and AAC have finally expired (hopefully), and DaVinci Resolve includes decode support for AAC (hopefully). I might still use the Fusion tab for creating some VFX, but I'm trying to see if I can work with Natron first.

As for other NLEs:

• Cinelerra-GG: I quite like this editor, but damn it is particular and some things are just annoying to do. I've also heard it has color management issues... that was the main reason I stopped using it. That, and I can't actually get it to build anymore, haha. The manual is super amazing and beats out almost every other NLE mentioned here except DaVinci Resolve. It's not a bad read even for just generally learning video editing.
• Blender VSE: It works okay but the workflow is very slow and the lack of sequences (only projects) only makes things more annoying.
• Openshot: I'm not a fan of the interface and found the workflow, at least initially, slow.
• Shotcut: Seems nice enough but it didn't work for me. I forget why.
• Pitivi: It crashed the instant I tried working with 4K footage.

Edit: Olive is nice too but very early stages. Color tools are very basic. And unfortunately development is winding down.

Ah...sorry, I just realized this probably isn't the response you're looking for. But I've spent a lot of this week trying to find a professional NLE on GNU/Linux and that was what I came up with. For the record, I'm a GNOME user and I liked Kdenlive the most out of free software NLEs. I'm looking forward to the new improvements to come from the fundraiser to improve workflow!