Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web

Re:Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web by asfgiaosnio on Friday September 01, 2023 @06:37PM (#37356871)

People often claim that ChromeOS is versatile enough to replace a normal computer because it has these various compatibility layers. They often fail to mention that they work terribly. You wind up with the poor performance and annoying isolation that VMs give, but with an extra helping of instability and incompatibility.

Stay very far away.

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Re:Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web by londons_explore on Friday September 01, 2023 @06:50PM (#37356973)

Test of if an OS is ready for regular users:

Does drag and drop work? Can I choose a random image/file somewhere in one tab/application and drop it into another.

Just testing that now...

* Drag HN logo to Whatsapp Web: Pass

* Drag from Google Photos to Photopea: Pass

* Drag a zip file from Google Drive to Dropbox: Fail.

* Drag an attachment from an email from gmail into an online hex editor: Fail

Conclusion: The web platform isn't yet ready.

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Re:Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web by jrajav on Friday September 01, 2023 @07:16PM (#37357169)

You could just as easily construct an arbitrary usability test over interop that the web platform excels at while current desktop apps do terribly. For instance:

* Send a link to a Google Drive document to another person on WeChat: Pass

* Send a link to a Microsoft Word document to another person on Slack: Fail

The web has different paradigms and some of them are an improvement, one being hyperlinks, another being instant delivery just for example (no install time).

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Re:Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web by londons_explore on Sunday September 03, 2023 @07:08AM (#37369418)

But you can drag and drop a word document to slack...

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Re:Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web by Klonoar on Friday September 01, 2023 @07:53PM (#37357371)

I've known "regular users" who don't even realize you can drag and drop between desktop applications.

Conclusion: this is an incredibly arbitrary metric.

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Re:Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web by nightfly on Friday September 01, 2023 @08:01PM (#37357405)

I've never even considered doing many of those things, and I've worked in IT for ~10 years and been using computers for 25

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Re:Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web by esperkin39 on Friday September 01, 2023 @07:53PM (#37357373)

Versatile is the opposite of what ChromeOS has become. I would argue that there was a time (beginning of pandemic) where it looked like Google might strike the perfect balance between web-reliant (PWAs and safer extensions) and legacy-OS supported (Android, Linux, and even some slight Windows compatibility).

Now, it just seems like a bad version of the legacy operating systems. Android, but in a VM, Linux, but in a VM, and Windows delivered via the cloud!

All of this is worse than just running any of those systems alone.

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Re:Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web by ajross on Friday September 01, 2023 @09:06PM (#37357763)

> Running anything Google hasn't approved is gated behind "developer mode", and even for a developer the pseudo-Debian container "developer mode" unlocks is confusing.

This is mixed up. "Developer mode" is a firmware mode that allows you to run unsigned images. You use that if you want to hack your ChromeOS image itself. The Linux development environment feature (crostini) runs in a VM on any chromebook, it doesn't require developer mode or any firmware features. Technologically it's basically the same thing as WSL, though integrated much better with the OS UI.

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