Most of the paid plugins I’ve messed with have code to phone home and prevent operation if there’s not a paid license of some sort.

However, before you bother trying to put effort into pirating those, I recommend making certain that what you want isn’t already freely available a different way. Many paid plugins have decent open source and free alternative plugin(s) that can be used instead. You just have to look hard enough in the plugin listing. The WordPress ecosystem is vast, but there are a ton of smarmy assholes charging monthly subscriptions for plugins that replicate features provided by free plugins and hoping you won’t notice.

I’m not trying to convince you to like something you don’t, and KDE is a fucking great suite of software.

However, it does sound like maybe you haven’t used GNOME in quite a long time. It does have various customizations built in that are available to users through the settings UI these days, and “tweaks that barely work” isn’t really a representative critique of the general ecosystem anymore.

GNOME’s extension platform is very mature at this point, and I’ve personally used a bunch of the same extensions for years now spanning like 10 major releases of GNOME without issue. Yeah, the little fly-by-night extensions that get two point releases and then are abandoned don’t work forever, but that’s true of a lot of old software, and is probably a good thing, honestly.

I tried the new version of the app (1.3.1) and it works a little better. As mentioned in my other comment, the app tries by default to write to my home directory, which fails. However, if I manually tell the app to use ~/Downloads instead, then it works!

On the other hand, closing and relaunching the app again clears out what I’ve manually configured and it tries to write to my home directory again until I change it every time.

(Also, apologies, I should be reporting to your issue tracker instead.)

Hey, sure no problem. I don’t actually have a Music folder ordinarily since I keep my music in a network location instead.

$ flatpak run --command=bash net.fhannenheim.musicfetch
[📦 net.fhannenheim.musicfetch ~]$ xdg-user-dir MUSIC
/home/luke

Flatseal shows that the app has requested permission to access xdg-music, which in my case is my home directory. I would assume that means it should be able to write there, but maybe the “All user files” toggle being off supercedes that? I’m not sure how flatpak permissions work, exactly.

Hey, thanks for the response! I tried again with the recent update (--version says 1.2.1) and still having the problem. The button you refer to opens my file manager in the system root directory, instead of the download directory shown in settings which is now by default set to my home folder instead of ~/Music like in the prior version.

To recreate, I ran the app from the CLI and searched the videos tab for “flowers”, then clicked download on the top result. The metadata pages had blank values (are they supposed to populate automatically somehow?), and I clicked through until I got to the final page below.

~$ flatpak run net.fhannenheim.musicfetch --version
musicfetch_gui 1.2.1
~$ flatpak run net.fhannenheim.musicfetch
libEGL warning: failed to get driver name for fd -1

libEGL warning: MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information

libEGL warning: failed to get driver name for fd -1

MESA: error: ZINK: failed to choose pdev
libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
libEGL warning: failed to get driver name for fd -1

libEGL warning: MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information

libEGL warning: failed to get driver name for fd -1

MESA: error: ZINK: failed to choose pdev
libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
[2026-01-28T19:22:43Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::app] Starting download of 1 songs
[2026-01-28T19:22:43Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::download] running yt-dlp with args ["--ignore-config", "-x", "-f", "ba", "-o", "/tmp/musicfetch/%(id)s.%(ext)s", "--load-info-json", "-", "-O", "after_move:filepath", "--progress-template", "download:%(progress.downloaded_bytes)s-%(progress.total_bytes)s-%(progress.downloaded_bytes_estimate)s", "--newline", "--progress"]
[2026-01-28T19:22:44Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::download] All songs downloaded
[2026-01-28T19:22:52Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::tagwriter] reading filetype from path /tmp/musicfetch/G7KNmW9a75Y.opus
[2026-01-28T19:22:52Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::tagwriter] filepath extension: Some("opus")
[2026-01-28T19:22:52Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::rename] moving song to: //1 - .opus
[2026-01-28T19:22:52Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::rename] creating parent dir: /

PS: I tried again with another song (Big Boogie - Shut Up) that seems to have metadata available from however MusicFetch is finding metadata. The logs are slightly different in that it seems to attempt to save the file where it is configured to do so (the home folder), but there’s still not actually a file saved in that location when I click to open in my file manager:

$ flatpak run net.fhannenheim.musicfetch
libEGL warning: failed to get driver name for fd -1

libEGL warning: MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information

libEGL warning: failed to get driver name for fd -1

MESA: error: ZINK: failed to choose pdev
libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
libEGL warning: failed to get driver name for fd -1

libEGL warning: MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information

libEGL warning: failed to get driver name for fd -1

MESA: error: ZINK: failed to choose pdev
libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
[2026-01-28T19:31:10Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::app] Starting download of 1 songs
[2026-01-28T19:31:10Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::download] running yt-dlp with args ["--ignore-config", "-x", "-f", "ba", "-o", "/tmp/musicfetch/%(id)s.%(ext)s", "--load-info-json", "-", "-O", "after_move:filepath", "--progress-template", "download:%(progress.downloaded_bytes)s-%(progress.total_bytes)s-%(progress.downloaded_bytes_estimate)s", "--newline", "--progress"]
[2026-01-28T19:31:11Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::download] All songs downloaded
[2026-01-28T19:31:17Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::tagwriter] reading filetype from path /tmp/musicfetch/B9RNRhoUr6E.opus
[2026-01-28T19:31:17Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::tagwriter] filepath extension: Some("opus")
[2026-01-28T19:31:17Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::rename] moving song to: /home/luke
    /Big Boogie/Shut Up/1 - Shut Up.opus
[2026-01-28T19:31:17Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::modules::rename] creating parent dir: /home/luke
    /Big Boogie/Shut Up
[2026-01-28T19:31:23Z INFO  musicfetch_gui::app::update] Opening directory at /home/luke
    /Big Boogie/Shut Up

Edit: forgot to mention, I’m using Fedora Workstation 43, in case that’s relevant for you.

Good luck with the app, it’s a really good idea!

I had similar problems where the logs say it moved the file to my Music directory, but the directory was empty. I made multiple attempts using different directories and making sure the app has permissions with flatseal, but no luck.

It seems like a nice app though, I’m gonna keep an eye on it!

You could use something like WinBoat to make installing and using a virtual machine for Windows a lot easier. It also makes Windows apps feel almost like they are native to your Linux desktop, which is nice.

Alternatively, you could try running Excel in wine using Bottles, but I’m not sure how well that’ll go since Excel is kind of a monster of an application.

No, we don’t force anyone to do anything, electric replacements are offered as a “free” upgrade. We’re a housing cooperative, so technically it’s not free, but it’s paid for by the community’s collective funds.

The other main problem is that people routinely forget to turn off their stoves. We’ve had the fire department come multiple times this year alone because someone left their gas on and filled their unit with it. One resident left his gas open for who knows how long before he passed out in his living room and shit himself. Luckily someone found him and called the paramedics.

I guess if it was one person living in the wilderness and they blew themselves up or suffocated, then that’s on them. In a community though, it endangers everyone nearby.

Gas is not safe.

Speaking as a board member in a housing community where we are actively dealing with residents who claim that their precious gas stoves are safe and they don’t want electric replacements, I appreciate this post being shared.

I’m always confused by people saying that Vortex doesn’t work on Linux, when I’ve used it for years now on both my Fedora desktop and my Steam Deck. I didn’t even have to do anything outrageous to get it working. Install with Lutris like anything else made for Windows, press play, it works great.

Edit: Realized this sounded maybe judgmental, when I didn’t mean it to. Not trying to make anyone feel bad in any way. More like encouragement, because once you get over the hump of figuring out how to use tools like Lutris to run games, running Vortex is the same process.

The specific font isn’t as important for me. Mostly I’ll use whatever sans serif option is available in the reader, since I generally despise serifs. Very occasionally I’ll go for a serif font on a fantasy book for “atmosphere”, though.

Can’t you already do that from Nautilus with bookmarked sftp locations?

I’m not commenting to discourage other tools from being made, just curious if there’s some aspect of that process that isn’t already easy to accomplish on Linux with existing GUI tools, or if you’d like to be able to do it differently is all.

Thanks, yeah I think so. At least, I’ve followed all the steps outlined here https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia but VLC and gstreamer apps continue to tell me that I’m missing codecs. I am stumped, but happy that at least Jellyfin plays everything.

I somehow keep running across videos that won’t load in Clapper, Showtime, mpv, VLC, or Handbrake, and Nautilus won’t show thumbnails for them. It’s very frustrating. Supposedly I’ve already installed all the available codecs from RPMFusion, but still get the “codec missing” error on a bunch of videos.

Jellyfin on the other hand, it plays everything I’ve ever thrown at it. I don’t know what the hell it’s doing differently from the other video players on my system, but it works great.

Because you’re the account who posted what I’m responding to.

You didn’t make any substantive critiques about the journalism, so why would anyone be responding to that? All you’ve said is that you “don’t care about ffmpeg”, which is dismissive of the software itself, so yeah obviously people are going to be responding about the software.

I have been using Bazarr for that, it works well. Pretty much just set it and forget it, and subtitles are just… there.

How can you seriously assert that people are using the term too lightly when you apparently don’t even know why they’re saying it?

Could you define the words “fascist” and “communist” as you understand them?

Going from needing Google’s permission to install apps to needing Apple’s permission to install apps. How would that help in any way?