Old Gear

[Irrev-Black]

I have too much old gear. Some of it hides in the barn, waiting for me to waste an inordinately long time trying to get it working again.

Indeed, my fear of recognising the failure of an old apparatus is so deep, I rarely try. The gear sits and glowers at me: we must both face the reckoning together at some stage.

Today, while tidying, I happened on two old Canon cameras, Powershots both, an A480 and an A495.

It turns out the A495 was beyond any hope of working again.

The A480's little whatever-passes-for-CMOS is kaput. It will never again hold date info between shutdowns. Still, I'm hanging on to it, because it's the best macro and night-shot camera I've had.

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[stylofone]

My "good" PC is the one I use for video editing and audio production. It's playing up, it won't boot windows. It's a seventh generation i7, roughly seven year old tech. If I have the stamina to learn new software I'll switch it to Linux. But it is a huge learning curve, so I'm going to try for a windows 10 re-install first so I can keep using the software I know. If necessary I'll get a new SSD, but the CPU and RAM are still fit for purpose. They can handle 1080 video and multichannel audio. So it's still mainly a software issue.

Actually I should put in the effort to learn how to use the Linux equivalents anyway, that can happen any time. I shouldn't wait for a hardware failure before putting in the work. It's the final frontier for me in boycotting evil corporate technology giants.

[Wrenn]

You could learn linux with VMWare (or equivalent) if you wanted too. Then switch when you are comfortable with it and found a distro that you like.

[stylofone]

You could learn linux with VMWare (or equivalent) if you wanted too. Then switch when you are comfortable with it and found a distro that you like.

Urgent clarification needed to stem the bleeding from the deep wounds to my geek pride!

I am already 99% Linux. My main PC and my laptop are not even dual boot. My "studio" PC is dual boot. I keep Windows on it purely because I have squillions of hours invested in Reason Studio and Vegas Video. They won't work under WINE. I've been using Reason since version 2 (early 2000s). I started on Vegas because it was spun off Sound Forge, the audio package I was using around 2000. The Linux equivalents for audio and video production have not been up to scratch in terms of stability and features until recent years, and even now they are known to have compatibility issues with external hardware. But now it's the learning curve of the software suites that's stopping me from switching. I'd have to abandon all that muscle memory from decades of use. It's the same issue that kept me loyal to Reason and Vegas while everyone else became enamoured with Ableton and Final Cut and their ilk. It's not that I'm so braindead that I can't learn new software, it's more that it has to provide fun, not frustration.

My current plan is to firstly rebuild the Windows partition, but simultaneously I will pull my finger out and start building a Linux media setup too, probably with Bitwig and Kdenlive, and start playing with them.

[nibble]

I'm a Linux only user (20+ years) and do all of my "limited" video editing using Kdenlive. Works well for my needs. There are heaps of good tutorials on youtube which will speed up the learning.

[stylofone]

I'm a Linux only user (20+ years)

20 years! You are numbered among the righteous!

For normal computing activities (web, office, photos), I was in and out of Linux several times in the 2000s/2010s, I kept going back to Windows for one reason or another. Then there came a time when I reinstalled Linux and never felt the need to go back again. I think it might have been a particular improvement to networking and Samba. That always annoyed me because all my music and video were on a NAS, and I also had a "Mediagate" branded digital player in the living room. It took a while before Linux would reliably talk to all the devices. Now instead of a Mediagate there is a raspberry pi running Kodi, and the networking is robust.

Now it's just the music/video production tools to go, but as I said, the deficit there is in my skills, not the quality of the tools. But I will get there.

[joele]

20 years! You are numbered among the righteous!

LMAO, I started in 1996 with linux, as OS/2 Warp was dead.. I guess I am truly holy, that or bat-shit crazy (personally going with the later).

Though to be fair I pretty much always kept a windows install just for games and photo editing.. Though thanks to Steam my gaming is 100% on linux now..

[nutmeg]

I've never had anything but Linux on my home computers. I was relatively late getting my first home computer (2005), and was fortunate enough to go to a shop whose manager was more than happy to sell me a Windows-free desktop computer and install Linux for me. Nowadays I use a Raspberry pi, and install Raspberry Pi OS Lite myself.
In my professional life I mostly used Unix, and hated Windows when I was first forced to use it, so I never even considered it for home use. I'm not into gaming or editing videos/music, and have found the GIMP more than adequate for editing photos.