So it has been quite a few months since I made my last post, mostly because every time I thought about it, I couldn't think of what to write. Rather than talk about a specific topic, this post will just kind of be an accumulation of stuffs that happened.
First off was the Steam sale, which in my opinion was meh. The only real reason I have Steam was because of the free games that I happened to amass during my random raffle entries. During the entire sale, I only got a couple of games that I really felt like I would play, primarily looking for local co-op games so my brother and I could play if he visits or if I visit. From this standpoint, Steam is kind of convenient because I don't need to really bring anything except maybe a controller if I really want one. To list off the games, Castle Crashers, Dungeon Defenders, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Forced, Megabyte Punch, Sanctum 2, They Bleed Pixels, and the Trine series. I've only really tried Dust, Megabyte Punch, and They Bleed Pixels so far, but I'm really enjoying them, thus the sale wasn't a complete flop for me. Only down side is that maybe half or so aren't on linux which kind of sucks...a lot.
In completely other news, the Krita project had a kickstarter which eventually made it's goal of 15k pounds which nets 12 features in 6 months. I would like to see the first stretch goal met (30k), but with only 7 days left when the first 15k took roughly the first 23 days, I'm not really expecting it to break the first stretch goal. Either way, I'm still hoping because I really do think the Krita project is filling a need for linux that isn't really covered by any other program. Sure there is MyPaint, or Inkscape, etc. but really those still pretty different from what krita is doing. MyPaint comes off as a simpler drawing program, not quite as featureful, but it's because of that simplicity that I like it. In my opinion, Krita sits somewhere inbetween GIMP and MyPaint, and from what I have heard from some dA artists, they regularly toss a drawing between them to cover everything they want.
On to archiving of texts and comics. Now I have a fair number of manga that I keep (just the stuff I really think I would reread) and a small amount of light novels. Granted, these don't take up the largest of spaces, but for a hoarder such as myself who doesn't buy new hard drives often, space is in relatively short supply. To make a long story short, I decided upon using epub for my light novels and djvu for my comics. Unfortunately, the results were not exactly always reliably smaller, but for the most part it seemed to be reducing sizes via compression and some quality loss (the loss was noticeable, but honestly I spend maybe around 5 minutes per chapter, so I only look at each page for a couple seconds at best). The problem with both of these formats is the lack of adoption, thus there aren't as many programs that can deal with them as CBR/CBZ or PDF. All in all, probably not the most effective kind of archiving, but worst case I could just find all of my stuff again and search for another format when I get sick of being locked to the few programs available.
Still on the topic of archiving, but this time it's about archiving managers like file-roller, xarchiver, peazip, etc. Some people would swear by cli commands and maybe just use tar, zip, unzip, or w/e, but fortunately I am the kind of person who wastes space to have a gui as well as cli program. So with that, I took a look at a couple of different archive managers (FreeArc, XArchiver, File-Roller, PeaZip, p7zip, B1 Free Archiver, and Squeeze). Starting with the bottom, Squeeze was kind of out because of how there doesn't seem to be any development at all, along with p7zip because it's just clunky and pretty much broken. Less standard are FreeArc, B1 Free Archiver, and PeaZip since those are made by other people and don't seem to be in any linux distro. FreeArc's current release is rather stale, having been a release back in 2010, but apparently there is an alpha branch that seems to be updated fairly regularly (latest was Mar 2014). Since the alpha wasn't in the AUR, only the release from 2010, I decided to skip it too. B1 Free Archiver is one I have pretty much never heard of at all. As far as I can tell, it's supposedly a QT application with half the gui conforming to the native desktop and the other half sticking to a hard coded theme I guess. Makes it look really weird with some themes, but it does seem to have some nifty features (a preview panel that can preview files inside archives). It also doesn't seem to have any dependencies on other stuff so possibly it doesn't need unzip, 7zip, rar, unrar, etc. packages to work, not that I'm going to try it. Then there is PeaZip which I have heard of a couple of times, but it has dependencies on lib32 packages for whatever reason and so I decided to also skip that one. It's a rather biased reason to skip a program, but honestly if it requires more packages, especially lib32 ones that probably won't be used for any other program, and does the same function as standard archive managers that integrate with the normal stuff, there isn't really a need to get peazip at all, with the only exception being that you just NEED peazip in your workflow...which I don't. That leaves us with two of the regular stock archive managers in linux distros: XArchiver and File-Roller.
XArchiver and File-Roller pretty much do as expected, though I find that I like using file-roller more despite the fact that it looks completely non-native thanks to the gnome stylized interface. So in the end, I only really found three archive managers that I deemed worth looking at and really there doesn't seem to be much of a problem with any of them aside from picking the one that suits your tastes (although, the B1 Free Archiver does have it's own format...that no one else uses).
And so, out of the random time spent derping around, nothing really much was found interesting that I could really consider productive, but meh it's a new post.
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