Some of us are old enough to remember when “that command terminal thing” was computing. Now there’s something about text on a black screen that seems to make people’s eyes glaze over and their brains turn off today. You’d think they were being asked to decipher the Matrix. Too many generations removed I suppose.

The reality is I’m definitely not figuring out how my compositor works, almost never touching system files, infrequently scripting, and almost always using “a tool NOW for a SPECIFIC thing.” I’m not a tech luddite. Modern computing is shiny and awesome. You want graphical tools for graphical tasks. But there are so many excellent specific-purpose CLI tools, typically included by default across nearly every distro, that make so much more sense to use over a GUI. Maybe not always but most of the time.

Simple example, damned if I’m gonna open a file browser, navigate to my downloads directory, right click - Cut (or Ctrl X), navigate to another directory, paste, then right click - Rename. Not when I can just open a terminal (realistically, I always have it open) and mv ~/downloads/kewlwallpapers_abstract_dark_blah_blah.jpg ~/pics/wallpaper/abstract_003.jpg Especially when tab completion means I just have to type a partial path or filename and slap Tab to fill in the rest. It’s just so quick.

I hate it because I don’t know how to do anything

Some examples of what you’ve been unable to accomplish might add clarity.

but I’m not smart enough to learn terminal

Bull. Shit. You’re just not used to it and, even without picking up any knowledge of shell scripting, you’re only a man somecommand away from understanding what specific command line programs do. somecommand --flag --another-flag /home/me/thing typically isn’t much different from opening some GUI app on Windows, ticking two boxes, opening the file picker and selecting C:\users\me\thing then clicking a button.

All that said, now we really need examples because there’s probably no need for you to be messing with the terminal to begin with. At least not if you aren’t doing anything outside basic computing like web browsing, chat, productivity tasks and such. So what are you trying to do in the terminal that the OS failed to provide a GUI for?

Flatpaks… NOOOOO…

I haven’t used Zorin but flatpaks are enabled by default if I understand. Yes, you can install them via the command line but it looks like you could just open the built in software center and search for whatever it is you want. The only exception I can imagine is if you’re trying to install from a source other than whatever Zorin uses by default (Flathub, I would guess).

dependencies not found

With Flatpaks? Wat? With some other command? Context, please.

Anytime I have to use terminal I ALWAYS make a backup

You’re competent enough to image and restore your drive but not stay out of trouble in your OS? You presumably had to learn whatever software, and the underlying concepts, you’re using for that. Clonezilla, Rescuezilla, Macrium Reflect, etc all exist to make it easier but you’ve gotta know what an “image” is, what it means create it and subsequently write it onto a drive. How to identify the correct drive so you’re not wiping out something unintentionally.

So, are you not spending even a few minutes to check if the code snippets you’re pasting are applicable to your specific distribution? At least skimming the man page for the commands you try to run? Are you assuming “it’s all just Linux, right?” and that there isn’t nuance between distributions? Running shell commands you don’t understand is like running whatever backup solution you’re using without understanding it - just blindly clicking buttons and maybe you get a backup or maybe you format a drive and lose decades of family photos, your research paper draft, and whatever else. And if a fuckup costs me a literal day of my life in restoration time, I’m making it a point to use that time to figure out why so I hopefully don’t repeat the process in the future.

There’s little substance in your complaints and I’m left just so genuinely confused. In my head I’m imagining a walking talking XY Problem. Some specific examples of what you were trying to achieve or the snippets you were blindly pasting might shed some light but, left to guess, your actions sound akin to gamer kids running random batch scripts claiming to tweak power settings or whatever else in order to eke out a few extra FPS. Windows isn’t going to protect anyone who treats it the same way you have seemingly treated Linux.

For sure. I need to invest in a better Blu-ray drive (or maybe a few for Automatic Ripping Machine ) but MakeMKV, Jellyfin and my library card are all homies as of late. Definitely check your library out.

I don’t know why it took me so long to consider mine. I’m really spoiled having a few branches in my county that lend between one another. Then they further lend with other libraries in counties throughout the state. It’s nothing to put in a few requests, wait to be notified, then swing by the local branch to checkout.

Enter the Fist? Enter the Dragon is in English. Way of the Dragon has Chinese and English dubs. Same for Fist of Fury. I’d have to check my other rips to see about them but I suspect it’s the same. It looks like a lot of the original, Chinese dubs were done in Mandarin for the larger Mandarin-speaking audience. Just how it was done at the time. Here’s an old thread over on KungFuFandom that talks about it.

Anyway, Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits from the Criterion Collection is an exact match to your list. Game of Death II appears amongst the content on the bonus discs and the rest of your list are all feature titles. There are a couple other alternative collections featuring a mostly-identical film lineup but consensus I’ve seen is that Criterion’s is the way to go.

If I’m to believe the AI overview (as you said, Google is useless), Enter the Dragon was the first film to feature his actual voice and it’s an English film. I don’t think I have but one audio track for that . Earlier stuff is dubbed. Search result explanations is that many Hong Kong movies at the time were shot silent then dubbed afterwards. That would make sense, since the “Chinese” audio track I have for Way of the Dragon seems to fit the lip movements rather precisely but it isn’t his voice. I’d have to check the other films to confirm they’re the same.

Your list, sure you’re aware, matches the Bruce Lee Criterion Collection set. I’d be adding “criterion” to the searches, if you’re not already, and hoping someone has full-set rip with multi audio and subs. I got remarkably lucky and my local library actually had the Criterion set (along with some “Universal Horror” Karloff and Lugosi films) so I was able to check them out and rip them myself. Depending on where you are and your local infrastructure, might be a good shout to check your local library too.

I was overdue for a reminder about this site. In the same spirit “USB Killers” are indeed a thing. One I saw, a while back on Hackaday, was basically a bunch of small surface mount capacitors on a board stuffed in a generic thumb-drive type case.

Intended to prevent accidental input from the side of your palm, when it’s resting on the screen, while using the stylus.

Had to look it up myself. The song was used as the main theme to an older web miniseries about a fictitious scene group. Just watched through the first episode and it tickled some nostalgia; mIRC, ICQ and such. Might have to give the rest of it a watch.

I remember him being gifted a golden pager and I’m still holding out hope that he gets the call.

Now that is an ambition to strive for! Easily one of the most significant communal projects of our time which, despite still remaining almost unheard of to countless people who unknowingly rely upon it, would be such a remarkable honor to take part in.

Unfortunately I can’t help in that regard. I keep everything local/unexposed so my solution for them was just running Jellyfin at their place. I was already rsyncing some stuff to a NAS I set up for them (and vice versa), as off-site backup. Since the files were already there it made the most sense to just give them their own instance.

Same boat except my Arduino and Pi devices are still gathering dust (but I do want to eventually get a general, foundational knowledge of electronics). My own ideas most often devolve into timesinks that leave me questioning how I even convinced myself to start down that road. I like doing dev stuff more if it happens when an update breaks something, like a service or a plugin to some app I host. “Hey, that’s a goddamn puzzle! I fucking love puzzles!” And there’s the underlying fact that, if I manage to solve it, I might be helping somebody else out. Some psychological compulsion to help others that I can identify but still not deny.

Anyway, I might never end up a “contributor” to anything else but one of my biggest highs was singlehandedly debugging, submitting, and having a fix merged to a Jellyfin plugin I use. From first reporting it and thinking out loud about it in the app’s Discord, to poking through the source on GitHub (in a language I’ve never touched), I worked it out in a few hours and even compiled a replacement .dll for my own use until the merge was accepted. To the reception of some compliments and pats on the back from regulars on the server that, at the risk of over sharing, did more for my emotional well being than my last lay. The problem ended up being a simple order-of-operations issue but the experience was the sort of the thing that makes a guy, who hasn’t worked so much as a help desk position, briefly think “Maybe I could hack it.”

Conversely, my biggest low was wasting 45 minutes on an Advent of Code problem because I forgot to switch from the sample data to my actual puzzle data in the second half. It was a first-week problem, probably child’s play for any pro, but I had a working solution fast enough to have landed on that day’s leaderboard. It would’ve been entirely self serving and good for nothing but bragging rights. Instead I wasted nearly an hour to reach the “duh” moment and subsequent self loathing. I wanted those bragging rights!

The TLDR is Programming turns bipolar disorder into a speed run session too easily for it to be more than an on-again off-again hobby or the occasional necessity for me. I can’t fathom how the actual pros, especially those in prestigious and lucrative positions, keep from crashing out or falling into imposter syndrome any time they let themselves get caught up in an off-by-one or some other nonsense.

I don’t have the link(s) on hand but there’s a Tizen build of Jellyfin for Samsung TVs. It runs rather slow on my old tube so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of a last resort. It’s actually smoother for me to just open the app on the TV and then remote control it from a browser/app on another device (my Steam Deck is my homelab universal remote). But you can use the Tizen dev tools or a simpler docker container to push it to the TV.

For my folks I got a cheap Walmart brand Android box (Onn 4k Plus). I installed Jellyfin from the app store then black hole’d the thing because I’m wary of cheap Android apps and their history of supply chain attacks. It’s much more responsive and also leaves me with the option of installing additional stuff like Smart Tubes, Retro Arch and whatnot.

I’m a fucking dolt that dabbles and picks up the gist of things pretty quick, but I’m not authority on anything, so “grain of salt”:

You’re already familiar with OCR so my naive approach (assuming consistent fields on the documents where you can nab name, case no., form type, blah blah) would be to populate a simple sqlite db with that data and the full paths to the files. But I can write very basic SQL queries, so for your pops you might then need to cobble together some sort of search form. Something for people that don’t learn SELECT filepath FROM casedata WHERE name LIKE "%Luigi%"; because they had to manually repair their Jellyfin DB one time when a plugin made a bunch of erroneous entries >:|