11 ms·
I haven't felt restricted by linux in a very long time, and I've been using it for over a decade.
by soperj 10y ago
I haven't felt restricted by linux in a very long time, and I've been using it for over a decade.
- paulddraper 10y agoI have been using Linux for a long time, and it seems like every time I try to watch a DVD, it's a fresh round of hacking for 30 minutes before I can get it to work.
- Mikeb85 10y agoHow? VLC + every distro has drivers...
- gribbly 10y agoWhat distro are you on ? As I recall, installing libdvdcss, libdvdnav, libdvdread from the official repos solved that problem and allowed me to painlessly watch dvd's through players like VLC and MPlayer.
- devoply 10y agoYou still watching DVDs grandpa? I wanna watch Netflix on the stupid thing. I use my android tablet for that instead.
- ekianjo 10y agoNetflix works without issue on Chrome in Linux.
- greenknight 10y agoAnd firefox if you switch your useragent -- https://linuxconfig.org/play-netflix-on-linux-with-firefox https://linuxconfig.org/play-netflix-on-linux-with-firefox
- ekianjo 10y agoYes, it also works. And you need to enable DRM support in Firefox as well.
- bigger_cheese 10y agoWow thank you for that link. I've had two browsers installed with chrome being used purely for Netflix. Now I can finally give the damn thing the boot.
- khedoros1 10y agoI slowed down for a while when I first got Netflix. Then I sped up again when some of the shows I was watching disappeared when I was mid-season. Netflix is great, but when I want to actually be sure that I'll be able to watch something, I buy it.
- ekianjo 10y agoYou just need to install one package at the most for dvd decryption, or use VLC... hardly a problem these days...
- paulddraper 10y ago"Hardly a problem" Several hundred AskUbuntu posts disagree with you. (And that's for Ubuntu...one of the friendly distros.) http://askubuntu.com/search?q=play+dvd http://askubuntu.com/search?q=play+dvd
- CaptSpify 10y agoI use linux as well, but wifi drivers are always an issue, as well as sound. Sure, things are much better, but I think most criticisms of linux not being "out of the box" ready are valid.
- harry8 10y agoNot as a comparison to apple. You want osx you buy the hardware they specify. Buy a laptop known to work out of the box with linux and it works out of the box with linux. Try it on any random laptop, ymmv. Not many of them work as badly as non-apple blessed machines with osx. It's pretty rare I can't get something useful out of any old laptop with a linux install. Is hackintosh still even a thing?
- seanp2k2 10y agoHackintosh is still very much a thing. I had a great 10.5 desktop with Kalyway years ago. I recently tried to get Yosemite or something working with a Core-i5 Sandy Bridge PC and it did not go well due to graphics drivers.
- NegativeLatency 10y agoI have a hackintosh as my main computer. It works ok. Graphics drivers are sometimes a pain/ buggy. iMessages doesn't work unless you want to do a lot of work. However it is faster/more expandable than most macs available today.
- voidlogic 10y ago>but wifi drivers are always an issue This is not true if you have Intel wifi hardware, which is a lot (a majority?) of laptops.
- herbst 10y agoIts not true these days anyway as you can just use the windows drivers if everything else fails. Which works perfectly except the initial 10 minute setup.
- jlgaddis 10y agoI just recently built a new workstation, including a Blu-Ray/DVD/CD burner. After seeing the recent announcement here about Handbrake, I grabbed the closest DVD, fired up VLC, watched the first few minutes of it, and shortly afterwards I had ripped and encoded one of the episodes to a file I can watch on my Roku. The only hacking I did was to install libdvd-pkg or something like that.
- swiley 10y agoLast time I checked, some early blueray DVDs will work on Linux but newer ones will brick your blueray reader.
- jlgaddis 10y agoWow, that's crazy. I haven't really used the drive other than what I mentioned. I just grabbed the nearest DVD (disc 2 of 3 of season 7 of "The Big Bang Theory"), popped it in, and it just worked. That was just a quick "test" to see how difficult it was nowadays to rip/encode DVDs (I haven't done that for probably eight years or so and it was a major PITA back then). I was planning on doing the same to most of our "media collection" so I'm hoping it continues to go well. Thanks for the heads up. I'll be looking more into this.
- khedoros1 10y agoThe AACS key file is updated every now and then. I get it from here: http://www.labdv.com/aacs/ http://www.labdv.com/aacs/ I've run into some recent disks that I can't play, but never one that actually damaged my blu-ray drive.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago"but newer ones will brick your blueray reader" Source? I don't even see how this could be possible.
- digi_owl 10y agoSay hello to DRM. Best i recall they introduced a updated DRM system for BR some years after launch, and to play those discs one need to either firmware update or replace the player. Never mind that the BR spec has all kinds of weirdness, including things like bundled Java applets(?!). All in all, its problems like these that keeps us torrenting.
- khedoros1 10y agoI usually use VLC without a problem. Some distros won't include something like libdvdcss, and you have to download, compile, and install it. It's annoying, but better than when DVD support first appeared, and you'd end up compiling something like 5 libraries and a custom version of Xine.
- 208Gi 10y agoI cannot remember having any trouble playing DVDs on a Linux based system within the last decade. Through this time, I've used: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch and, Suse. If your distro doesn't come with DVD playing capabilities out of the box, there are plenty of instructions regarding this on the the web. I have a hard time seeing how you could possibly be being honest about this.
- danieldk 10y agoI have a hard time seeing how you could possibly be being honest about this. Isn't distributing libdvdcss illegal in the US and therefore most distributions don't include it? So, most distributions don't come with full DVD playing capabilities out of the box.
- dTal 10y agoThis. This is the reason for parent's complaint - it's legal, not technical. I have exactly the same experience of "30 mins hacking to make a new system play DVDs" - sure, it's a single package install usually, but which package? libdvdread? libdvdcss? Does the package include the library, or does it contain a script that downloads the library because of the legal issue? I know the answers to these questions on Debian because I use it so much (and it has a well updated wiki), but plonk me in front of a distro I've not used before, or with poor documentation for their particular idiosyncratic way of end-running the law, and suddenly it's a minefield.
- NoGravitas 10y agoTrue for Fedora, probably Debian, probably not Ubuntu. For Fedora, it's a matter of adding the RPMFusion-nonfree repository, and installing a couple of packages.
- 208Gi 10y agoI should have been clearer, I guess. Yes, there's some legal issue but - a google search is not illegal. The poster was saying he/she has to go through some lengthy process every time he/she wants to watch a DVD? That's the dishonesty I'm talking about. Getting dvd playback working in a distro is a do it once and forget about it until EOL type thing.
- peteretep 10y agoAnother feature I'm yet to have any confidence in is that I can just close a Linux laptop, and have it do a pretty much perfect suspend that will come back to life in 2-3 seconds even if it's been closed for days.
- josteink 10y agoAs a counter example, I've yet had this to be a problem on any laptop I've owned. It works 100% reliably 100% of the time.
- jeena 10y agoSame here, both on ThinkPad and on my Tuxedo laptop with Ubuntu, Debian and Arch. I had issues with OS X sometimes that I put the MacBook into a bag and it would get hotter and hotter because it didn't sleep and the air couldn't move, untill it panicked and shut itself down to not start burning.
- pareidolia 10y agoI started owning laptops in 2007. There's a real difference between ACPI DSDTs compiled with the Microsoft compiler versus the Intel compiler (surprise surprise) Acer/Wistron laptop with MSFT DSDT would reset spontaneously instead of waking up from sleep.
- dTal 10y agoI have no complaints about suspend itself, but I do find lidswitch detection to be faintly unreliable on various laptops. I often find my laptop fully powered up and hot in my backpack. I suspect poor debounce.
- randlet 10y agoOut of curiosity what do you (or anyone else who wants to chime in) use for filling PDF forms? Adobe is about the only reason I still dual boot Windows alongside Linux :/
- lamlam 10y agoGoogle Chrome added that feature at some point recently. You can fill in forms you open through it. And it's a very good experience. Chromium possibly does it do, have not tested tho.
- Insanity 10y agoI can confirm that it works on Chromium with this test file: http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/feature-details/acrobat/axi/pdfs/create-forms-sample.pdf http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/feature-deta...
- benjaminjackman 10y agoI honestly can't remember the last time I have had to do that. One idea would be to try installing Adobe via wine if you can't find a native program.
- crazy2be 10y agoYou can install adobe reader on Linux. On Ubuntu it's acroread from package adobereader-enu. Although sometimes you can use Chrome (or evince, or okular), occasionally Adobe Reader is the only one that can fill forms properly.
- kleiba 10y agoBut Adobe does not officially support Linux any more so you won't get updates. I've had some success with running current Adobe Reader in wine but trying to print makes the program crash, so there you have it.
- LarryMade2 10y agoI fill in tax forms with adobe 9, if no that I think the new acrobat compatibles for Linux are getting better at forms now
- digi_owl 10y agoHonestly i feel more restricted now than i did back when i first started...
- rconti 10y agoConcur; switched to Linux full-time in '95 and to OS X in 2002 and haven't really looked back. I still use Linux daily in my job, but I can't say I miss it as a desktop OS.
- b3lvedere 10y agoI've seen almost everything from Sinclair ZX Spectrum to Microsoft Azure. Linux has another learning curve for me than products like Windows server, but i'm slowly getting used to it again. These days i have very limited money to experiment with computer systems. So i turned an old desktop into an esx. Using linux for my vm's has been very rewarding. There is a ton of resources. Most of the stuff is free. The communities usually love to help you reach your goal.