Onihikage

Webtoon is still shitty in other ways. When they adapt a property, they want it their way, regardless of the author’s original vision. I’ve seen several stories that originated on Royal Road get Webtoon adaptations, and the adaptations always seem to change or leave out important parts of the story, making characters look stupid or just completely replacing entire sets of characters, forcing the story to diverge substantially when inevitably something they got rid of turns out to have been critically important to where the author was taking things. They turn great stories into middling slop every single time.

MPV is a video player.

It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!

The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.

The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.

Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.

I’d get premium if they weren’t so insistent on bundling in bullshit I don’t want or care about to justify the high price. I put up with enough of that from cable TV. I’ll pay when there’s an ad-free tier that doesn’t do anything else and is a reasonable price for “the service that’s free with ads, but without ads”. If there was a per-device premium tier that I could throw on my Roku, and all my family members could have premium when they stream from there, I’d pay for that. I’d pay for family tier if it didn’t have the dumb single-household rule which screws over truckers and those who travel for a living.

Google has options they could take to convince consumers to pay to not see ads, but there’s no creativity left there, no effort to court the market or adapt the service and prices to what potential customers need and are willing to pay. And it’s because they believe they are the market, and want to keep it that way.

It’s not gone, they didn’t even take down all of the Nintendo games, they took down specific games (reddit link), albeit a lot of them, but there’s still lots of stuff left.

Is Live Captions not an option?

his “solution” is some kind it proprietary video player that just plays Youtube videos.

It’s not proprietary, it’s source-available, and it plays a lot more than YouTube videos - in addition to YT, I use it to watch Nebula, Twitch, Odysee, and even Peertube on rare occasions. There are other plugins (that I don’t use) for BiliBili, Rumble, Patreon, Kick, and Soundcloud, and the way its plugin system works, there’s potential for many other paid subscription-based streaming services to be viewable through Grayjay. That is its real strength. If a creator uploads to a bunch of platforms, users can follow them on the platform they prefer, and get all their updates from one feed in one app, with added functionality that the official apps or sites simply might not have.

This is FUTO’s way of trying to make web video platforms more competitive, by creating an app that can interface with content from all of them and has all the popular features even if the sites themselves don’t. Grayjay has playlists, likes, dislikes, background playback, picture-in-picture, local history, the ability to block certain creators from the home feed, and the ability to hide individual videos from your feed. Furthermore, creators get a lot of ways they can monetize their content in Grayjay, like putting their merch store under the description of their videos, donation buttons, links to their Patreon or other subscription services, or general promotions, that would appear under all of their videos. Like… there are a lot of features here that really improve the experience with otherwise lackluster competitors. This tilts the market a tiny bit away from the established dominant players, and every new Grayjay user tilts it a little bit more.

Finally, it’s worth emphasizing that this is not Louis Rossmann’s personal pet project. His promotion of Grayjay, while it does align with his personal values, is paid work for a literal tech billionaire, Eron Wolf, who created and runs the FUTO organization. Neither of them need you to “take Louis Rossmann seriously.” They only want you to consider if the apps the company makes suit your needs and values.

Grayjay still works? YT-DLP still works? I sleep.

It can, there’s an Open Subtitles plugin that can automatically download subtitles in specified languages that match (or don’t) the file hashes of your media. Being an open database of subtitles, though, YMMV. You configure it on a per-library basis.

If businesses were required to release the full source code for any piece of software that becomes defunct as a result of, for example, shutting down the servers it connects to, imagine how quickly they’d push an update that allows it to work offline.

A non-steam game can be launched through Steam on either device, but Steam doesn’t sync game saves for non-Steam games, hence Toribor’s use of syncthing. Once a sync job is set up for each game’s save folder, it’ll keep them synced about as well as Steam does for native games.

I suspect what you really did by removing the global tags was change the file’s hash to something brand new so it was no longer on Defender’s list of suspicious files. Try removing different aspects of the MKV or add a random text file as an extra subtitle and see if any of those MKVs are also flagged; they probably won’t be.