alberto
Tutorials
| Title | Score |
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Software reviews
| Software | Score |
|---|---|
| wine-installer "Using MS Windows programs directly in Linux always struck me as an overly ambitious goal. Yet, Wine works fairly well for many programs. I regularly use MS Office 2007, Photoshop CS5 and the only game I play, Rise of Nations. There are very minor glitches but the programs are fully functional and very, very fast.I think, Wine is not for people that go on installing and removing programs at a fast pace. But if there are some MS programs you normally use and you can't replace with native Linux stuff, for any reason (my Impress presentations look weird in Power Point and I can't really give up Rise of Nations) and if those programs rate silver to platinum in the Wine database, there are good chances you can run them on Mint too. Some learning is required, mainly about Prefixes and Winetricks, and sometimes a program wouldn't work without the workarounds suggested in the Wine Database. But the learning curve is not steep and once you get the hang of it, it's such a pleasure to have that MS stuff running smoothly in your system, without having to start virtual machines and lose a good deal of your computing power. And so, I think the project is in fact very ambitious, yet great, as Linux tends to be. Just one thing: in case you find out an efficient way for running a program, contribute your info to the WineHQ database." |
4 |
| dropbox "I've been using it for several years and recommended it to friends and relatives. I gradually reached a free store limit of 16.5 GB, which is more than enough for me, because I use ext. SSDs for backing up big files. Installation was very smooth in both Mint Cinnamon and Mate. They recently limited free users to three devices. I especially like the possibility of falling back to previous versions of the saved files (from the website). It works smoothly on Linux (I have presently two Mints and a Lubuntu installed) and regularly upgrades. I disagree from user Nyarlathotep: to my knowledge, Dropbox never ended support for Linux, they cut down Linux sync support to ext4 filesystems in 2018 but brought it back to ZFS, XFS, Btrfs And eCryptFS in July 2019. If the functionality of Dropbox for free users should still shrink, I'll have to move to another cloud or subscribe to a 2TB Dropbox plan, which is way too much for me. However, Google Drive is a very poor option for Linux users and it gives me the impression of getting trapped in the Google world of interconnected apps. User Darroch here promoted Mega and I had a look at it but I am not fully convinced -- Paypal severed its relationship with Mega in 2015, the founder of Mega is now warning users against it, some cloud "experts" such as cloudwards.net write that concerns about the survivability of Mega are "reasonable"; on a more technical side, incremental syncing is not supported by Mega and synced files have to be wholly uploaded whenever they are changed. The positive facts are: Mega fully supports Linux distributions and provides full encryption. However, they change quickly and unpredictably: their allotment of free storage shrank to 15 GB and, as a matter of fact, I could NOT find any free plan in their site. If I have to pay for a 2TB service (that I don't need) I'll go for Dropbox after all." |
4 |
| 0ad "The game is ok and very promising, but the AI is too weak. I was a Rise of Nations player -- still am, in my XP Virtualbox -- and it was much, much more challenging. In 0AD, you have to follow some simple principles: build up a strong economy, don't spread too wide at the beginning, just conquer the areas that are vital for economy; after that, move on, attack and destroy the opponent. The programmers could at least give the AI a whopping amount of resources to start with. Formations can also be improved: these are a bit awkward to manage and sometimes move in a weird way. For example, you should be able to give the command: form just here -- and not: form first, then reach this point. This would be useful when you have to quickly reach and defend a position. I also tried to fight two AI opponents at the same time, but that is too difficult, unless you are lucky and don't make any mistakes..." |
4 |