Most stuff that runs on Windows is uninteresting because there are superior free alternatives on Linux, but in the cases where I needed it, Bottles is great.

I’m not sure what people are referring to in other comments when they say Bottles has “jank”, but for me it works very nicely for the few apps I occasionally need to use it for: Daz3D (just worked), jDownloader (just worked), and Affinity (followed this guide and it worked easily).

I agree! Though, I think the OP is a bot judging by it’s post history, despite not marking itself as one.

Unsure what you want to accomplish exactly, but if all you need is just literally to share your desktop and the sound from it, OBS Studio is great for that. It doesn’t even matter if whatever video platform you’re using supports screen sharing, you can just do it yourself very easily using OBS’s dead-simple Virtual Camera feature.

I’m not trying to convince you to like something you don’t, and KDE is a fucking great suite of software.

However, it does sound like maybe you haven’t used GNOME in quite a long time. It does have various customizations built in that are available to users through the settings UI these days, and “tweaks that barely work” isn’t really a representative critique of the general ecosystem anymore.

GNOME’s extension platform is very mature at this point, and I’ve personally used a bunch of the same extensions for years now spanning like 10 major releases of GNOME without issue. Yeah, the little fly-by-night extensions that get two point releases and then are abandoned don’t work forever, but that’s true of a lot of old software, and is probably a good thing, honestly.

You could use something like WinBoat to make installing and using a virtual machine for Windows a lot easier. It also makes Windows apps feel almost like they are native to your Linux desktop, which is nice.

Alternatively, you could try running Excel in wine using Bottles, but I’m not sure how well that’ll go since Excel is kind of a monster of an application.

I’m always confused by people saying that Vortex doesn’t work on Linux, when I’ve used it for years now on both my Fedora desktop and my Steam Deck. I didn’t even have to do anything outrageous to get it working. Install with Lutris like anything else made for Windows, press play, it works great.

Edit: Realized this sounded maybe judgmental, when I didn’t mean it to. Not trying to make anyone feel bad in any way. More like encouragement, because once you get over the hump of figuring out how to use tools like Lutris to run games, running Vortex is the same process.

The specific font isn’t as important for me. Mostly I’ll use whatever sans serif option is available in the reader, since I generally despise serifs. Very occasionally I’ll go for a serif font on a fantasy book for “atmosphere”, though.

Can’t you already do that from Nautilus with bookmarked sftp locations?

I’m not commenting to discourage other tools from being made, just curious if there’s some aspect of that process that isn’t already easy to accomplish on Linux with existing GUI tools, or if you’d like to be able to do it differently is all.

Thanks, yeah I think so. At least, I’ve followed all the steps outlined here https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia but VLC and gstreamer apps continue to tell me that I’m missing codecs. I am stumped, but happy that at least Jellyfin plays everything.

I somehow keep running across videos that won’t load in Clapper, Showtime, mpv, VLC, or Handbrake, and Nautilus won’t show thumbnails for them. It’s very frustrating. Supposedly I’ve already installed all the available codecs from RPMFusion, but still get the “codec missing” error on a bunch of videos.

Jellyfin on the other hand, it plays everything I’ve ever thrown at it. I don’t know what the hell it’s doing differently from the other video players on my system, but it works great.

Because you’re the account who posted what I’m responding to.

You didn’t make any substantive critiques about the journalism, so why would anyone be responding to that? All you’ve said is that you “don’t care about ffmpeg”, which is dismissive of the software itself, so yeah obviously people are going to be responding about the software.

Incompatible with every website in which browser? It works for years in both Chrome and Firefox. Is this a meme for Safari users only?

The fact that Google invented this format is the most annoying thing about webp, but the complaints in this image haven’t been an issue for a very long time in my experience.

Aha oops I edited at the same time as your reply! Thanks for the elaboration, that’s helpful!

What does “ssd” mean in this context? I’m guessing it’s not solid state drive since that doesn’t make any sense in these sentences, but searching that acronym isn’t very helpful.

Edit: I guess it means “server side decorations”. I see that OP did use the full phrase once, but it didn’t click with me initially. Wikipedia says that means the window manager draws titlebar buttons, as opposed to client side decorations which enables the app developer to control the titlebar of their app.

This sounds like a perfect use-case for setting Junction as your default “browser”: https://flathub.org/en/apps/re.sonny.Junction

It shows a dialog when you open a URL, allowing you to specify which browser you want to use each time.

In theory, you could then open links in your host OS browser usually, but still be able to select the VM browser easily sometimes.

There’s also GNOME Maps if you enjoy the GNOME look and feel (which I do):

GNOME does this by default, so if it’s not working for your SO, they probably have installed some extension that modifies that behavior. I’ve never used Mint, but I think it’s pretty heavily modified from base GNOME, so maybe it has that feature disabled with whatever their suite of modifications does. I’d poke around in the panel settings if those are exposed to you in Mint.

I’ve been using n8n for years, but their constant (admittedly mild) nagging to upgrade is bugging me lately, so I’ve been looking into alternatives.

Kestra looks promising, but I haven’t played around with it much.

Anyhow, I’m appreciating the perspective of the article you shared. Thanks!

You have a lot going on there all at once that could be contributing to the whole thing failing.

If it were me, I would try to get caddy working independently of everything else first, since it was your original problem, then layer in the other containers one by one in case you’ve got configuration problems in them too.

Caddy by itself is super easy to verify with something like a browse directive pointed at an empty directory.

Then add your tailscale container and configs, and check that you can still access the browse page from caddy.

Then add your Jellyfin container and adjust the Caddyfile to proxy to it.