Same prefer, although I'm not sure what you mean by "installing changes data in places on my disk"?
Nothing should change, all installations and addons go to the ~/.var directory. When you launch the application, yes it can start reading and writing to arbitrary places on disk, which is why I make it a habit of first launching Flatseal to modify permissions and know exactly what it can and can't do and reach.
I actually vastly prefer this methodology with what we have right now, but if it or something else adopted an application/directory methodology as you described I'd be elated.
I still do it the latter way! Though only because I'm unnecessarily picky about how my tags are formatted, cover art presented and picks of appropriate codecs. It would be an immense chore to do it completely from my phone at the moment, but I'm also pleased to see how much actually can be done on the go^^
I have a 7.1 system, unfortunately, this is an issue here as well, that I will argue grew worse since Atmos started becoming mainstream.
Particularly in the mid-to-late 00's, centre speaker dialogue was very bombastic and stood out very well even in high action scenes. Yes the volume was still sometimes mismatched, but not to the point a discreet multi-channel setup needed to constantly adjust volume. Films from the previous two decades had even less issues just thanks to the simplicity.
Atmos feels like a huge wasted potential to me personally. With the added height channels, you can create some amazing effects and absurd imaging that was never possible before, but the reliance on this kind of swerved sounds and vocals to overlap each other in more awkward ways that makes it feel like everything is originating from a reverberation chamber. Particularly with dialogue, Atmos helps create positional ambiance with indoor scenes, so vocals often sound muddier than they should be.
Even worse, streaming services provide a mix that obviously caters to handheld devices, TVs and soundbars, while being Atmos 7.1.4, sounding particularly terrible for both kinds of watchers. Blu-ray's thankfully still often directly target home theatres and sound much better for the latter.
That's just been my experience so far. Going from a simple 5.1 Jamo from 2007 to an upgraded Atmos setup, I've been blown away far less by action films these days. It's even amazing if you hear the rears getting utilised at all.
Yeah, I have 11.1 with sound treatments and a receiver that does room correction, and some movies are just annoyingly mixed. Dune (2021) has the voices mumbled and so low that when I turned it up enough to hear them it caused the explosions to be so loud that my cat jumped off my lap and ran out of the room, which I don't think he's ever done before.
Christopher Nolan is probably the most infamous offender; he's said even other filmmakers contact him and complain about his mixes. It's apparently how he wants it to sound, and he's said things like he sometimes treats dialogue as a sound effect and mixes it low on purpose, despite the many many articles and such about how much audiences hate it. I could swear at one point he even countered with something like "you shouldn't need to hear all the dialogue to understand what's going on". Ugh.
Same here, I've noticed that mostly since the point Atmos started becoming mainstream, movies just aren't mixed like standard films from the late 90's to 00's. Sure, we didn't have overhead sound sources or admittedly fantastic imaging for the few films that do it right, but overall, everything sort of feels like a narrow, bland tunnel tuned for soundbars / TVs, for which neither Home Theatre nor Soundbar owners enjoy ironically.
The "Enhance Dialogue / Reduce Loud Sounds" feature on the Apple TV has been amazing for helping to rectify this, but I would prefer to leave the dynamic range of the track alone.
I share the same experience with Snapdrop-like websites, self hosted or otherwise, where establishing connections would have a 30% failure rate, speeds progressively deteriorate on very large files, and bundling files together would need them to zipped first which can waste time. LocalSend has none of these issues and has been rock solid in my year of use so far, and I also like that it can send plaintext easily, which fills the gap sites like SimpleSavr and Pushbullet would normally cover.
The only caveat is that you need to have the application installed on all the devices you want to use it with (so it's not a true universal AirDrop or QuickShare alternative) but for your own devices, this is fine.
This is my dream scenario, stock Android and iOS having the feature to disable network access for apps.
It's such a simple, quality of life improvement for certain apps that I know I never want to phone home for any reason outside of 'cloud centric' features. Blocking traffic and DNS requests by hand is time-consuming, and new servers / connections can prop up at anytime without one's knowledge, not to mention you might block a domain for a specific app but need it for another (star.c10r.facebook.com for example, which also blocks Meta AI research websites).
I kind of get why they wouldn't, such as unexpected behaviour, sweet data collection and license checking, but man. At least a handful of custom ROMs and local-VPN privacy apps on Android allows for this.
Yes, this is what I meant by local VPN privacy app (didn't find the right words admittedly, as it's not a standalone firewall per say and unfortunately cannot be used in tandem with a real VPN tunnel), excellent one though!
Agreed. If I need the best performance out of a Remote Desktop, thankfully there is Sunshine⁽¹⁾ and KASM,⁽²⁾ though it requires significant setup beforehand and bugs do crop up on certain desktops + window protocols.
RDP as a regular or quick solution is actually really decent in this respect.
KasmVNC has worked great for me to setup development VMs which require GUI work. Kasm Workspaces is an interesting product which allows you to create disposable desktop sessions. I use it to test software, setup a particular configuration, then throw it away.
Nothing should change, all installations and addons go to the ~/.var directory. When you launch the application, yes it can start reading and writing to arbitrary places on disk, which is why I make it a habit of first launching Flatseal to modify permissions and know exactly what it can and can't do and reach.
I actually vastly prefer this methodology with what we have right now, but if it or something else adopted an application/directory methodology as you described I'd be elated.