my Windows computer has always been like a second home to me - a digital refuge and safe space for me to be creative and express myself. as far as i could remember, i've always been using some form of Windows for my primary computer. used XP at school when i was young, skipped Vista, grew up on 7, skipped 8 / 8.1, jumped on the 10 beta the second it was available.

i never really had any other option - i was too young to be trusted with something as expensive a mac. i had played around with Linux by installing Ubuntu on a very old laptop, but i never thought that it would be able to replace Windows on my desktop because of just how many games i loved to play

fast forward to today, 2025. i'm 18 and bored. the latest Windows 11 didn't hit the same as older releases - filled with constant begs for you to use their llm (copilot), ads for cloud storage every update and an absolute insistance on logging in with a microsoft account, with workarounds required to just make a normal user account. it feels like using windows in the modern day requires you to fuck so much with the system just to get an OS that dosen't bug you..

additionally, microsoft as a company have demonstrated horrifying behaviour by choosing to support the Israeli Defense Forces carry out a genocide on innocent palestinian civilians, by enabling the IDF to spy on all Palestinian phone calls.

so. to recap. i'm sick of windows. i'm sick of microsoft. what now? well, i still play video games a lot, so my only option is linux

let's install linux!

i chose to go install Arch Linux due to its fairly minimal nature. arch allows you a lot of control over what you want on your system, lacking things as simple as a network manager from a stock configuration. another benefit of arch is it's excellent community support, such as the arch wiki. the arch wiki is so well done that if you want to install a piece of software on your system, theres a 90% chance that the arch wiki has an article describing exactly how to install and configure it correctly.

installing was more involved than distros with a graphical installer, having to do things like partitioning with terminal commands and learn a few concepts. i actually enjoy this though - the arch setup is easy enough to where you can follow it just by reading a wiki page but it's involved enough to where you get to learn things about your system that you wouldn't normally understand.

• "what's an EFI partition?"
• "what's an fstab?"
• "which bootloader am i running and how is it installed?"
• "what desktop environment do i want to use?"
• "what are pipewire, pulseaudio, alsa and jack?"
• "what's a display server and why is X11 the root of all evil?"

these are some of the things i learnt when installing arch, and i found it to be a very informative experience.

i only experienced two issues installing - one being a unique quirk of my motherboard, as my MSI motherboard only detects the GRUB bootloader when it's installed to a specific path (this was fixed by installing the bootloader with a specific path argument). the second issue is that i forgot to install a network manager so i booted into the installed system and couldn't install anything. woops!

the beauties of linux

when things on linux work, they work fairly well. one of the first things i noticed after installing is how fast my system boots. when i had windows on this system it took so much longer to boot and even after logging in, had to take a minute to warm itself up. now my system just works straight from the get go, and the slowness is from my common applications starting up.

i love plasma

for my desktop environment, i chose KDE Plasma as i had previously used it on a Steam Deck and really enjoyed how comprehensive it was. for anyone considering a move to linux, i highly recommend KDE Plasma as a desktop environment - it's very similar to windows, looks great out of the box and is highly customizable. i use the stock Breeze window decorations with custom font choices (Inter) and a Catppuccin Mocha color theme.

plasma is also great because KDE maintain some solid companion software which is right at home with it. a lot of tools that people take for granted on Windows isn't part of a desktop environment by default and is actually seperate software. some things like a file manager (Dolphin), document viewer (Okular), terminal (Konsole), unzipping tool (Ark), task manager (Plasma System Monitor) etc. kde maintains all of these and they all have a consistent visual style and work super good. thank you everyone that makes these incredible tools for free 💜

user choice + sandboxing

software on linux is also fairly easy to install with lots of choice about how you install it. software can either be installed onto the system directly using the package manager (pacman in my case) or software can be installed as a "flatpak" through an app store interface (discover) which isolates the program from the main system and only lets it have specific access to certain files.

year of the linux desktop (aka "the horrors of linux")

"year of the linux desktop" is the old everlasting phrase and has become the new favourite expression in my friend group whenever someone is having issues due to linux.

creative stuff has a way to go

my main issue with linux and why i haven't been able to go full time sooner is a lack of professional creative tools. i make music and my DAW of choice is Ableton Live. while it is possible to run Live under Wine, even if i am able to get a DAW running on the whole it's a fairly janky experience. there is hope for the future however- Bitwig Studio (a daw created by former Ableton employees) has native linux support, and there are tools like yabridge to enable windows VST/CLAP plugins to run under Wine and interface with them in a linux host daw seamlessly.

i'm still looking for a good image editing program. i refuse to use GIMP. Krita, although great for painting and art, is a bit clunky for editing images together. Affinity Photo, a great photoshop alternative supposedly runs under Wine, but requires a custom Wine build to work and can be prone to crashing.

video games

game compatibility on the whole is great (especially with Proton), but i have run into a few game-specific problems. games with restrictive anti-cheat can be hit or miss to run, due to some games forcibly disabling linux support even when technically possible. notably as of writing, Fortnite lacks linux support in its implementation of Easy Anti-Cheat. this means the only ways for me to play Fortnite are to buy a second gpu and make a Windows virtual machine with gpu passthrough, or use cloud gaming servers.

more about linux anti-cheat at Are We Anti-Cheat Yet!

when DELTARUNE chapters 3+4 released in june 2025, the game mostly ran completely fine under Proton, with the exception of the video cutscene at the start of chapter 3. unfortunately, i had to view the cutscene video manually in vlc, which ruined my immersion of the game a little bit.

futures, made of, virtual reality

i play a fair amount of VRChat using my quest 2, and it mostly works well. as of writing, vr on linux is in an interesting place. streaming to a meta/pico headset using ALVR or WiVRn works decently well, and sometimes works even better than when i used Oculus Link under Windows.

there are problems. lots of them. for a start, when i installed ALVR i ran into a unique problem where after about 1 minute of streaming to the headset, my entire pc would disconnect all of its usb devices. i ended up having to edit my bootloader config to fix this - i still have no idea how i was supposed to know to change that.

SteamVR on linux is essentially treated as abandonware and things like desktop overlays straight up don't work under modern wayland setups, having to use plugins like WlxOverlay-S instead. there are open source alternatives (Monado and WiVRn), but those carry their own problems like not having the nice dashboard of SteamVR.

authoring content for VRChat comes with it's own set of problems too! VRChat uses the Unity engine, which does have a native linux version, but has a few problems. Unity on linux renders under OpenGL (or Vulkan) and it seems like a lot of popular toon shaders (namely Poiyomi) have issues rendering in the editor and must be "locked in" to be able to be viewed. Unity on linux also doesn't support wayland, so dragging and dropping files won't work.

more info about linux vr at the Linux VR Adventures Wiki!

what now?

i love my linux setup just because of how personal it feels to me, and i'm glad i made the switch and haven't fallen back into dual-booting. i'm hopeful for the future of the platform!

personal wishlist as of now:

• ableton please make a linux native build of Live. i know you have it, Push and Move run on linux!!
• serif please affinity photo linux build...
• epic games please let me play fortnite on linux (you build assets for linux server i know you can do it)
• vrchat please make a linux native build of vrchat...
• valve please make a new vr headset and fix steamvr
• someone make a nice music player, musicbee under wine sucks, elisa is missing features and strawberry is ugly

i was only able to make the switch because i moved all of my creative work to my mac. if i didn't have another computer, i would be heavily limited as to what creative work i could do

if you're interested in trying linux, check out distrochooser.de to see what distro is right for you

if you enjoyed this, consider following me on bluesky or donating to me

as of writing, WEBFISHING is a super cool game but it only has a build for windows. shame! if only there was a complicated guide to making it work natively on macOS without virtualisation

⚠️ UPDATE 15-03-2025 (i can't join lobbies!) ⚠️

recent game updates have caused lobbies to break, meaning this guide may produce a game client which cannot join game lobbies.

you can try to use webfishing-macos-installer by Estyms, which will patch the issue with the game, and may fix the bug for you. the program automates the steps of this guides and provides additional patches and modding capabilities.

step 1 - install steam for mac

to get the game files, you need to own WEBFISHING on steam. you can sorta skip these steps if you've already got the files for the game on a windows/linux pc and can drag them across to your mac

download steam if you dont have it already for some reason??

after it's installed, make sure steam is completely closed for the next step

step 2 - force install webfishing

using finder, navigate to /Users/(your user)/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps.

how do i do that?

to do this, click on documents or something and at the bottom you should see "Users > username > Documents". click on your username. after that, press ⌘ CMD + ⇧ SHIFT + . to show hidden folders. you should then see the library folder appear!

in the folder, use any text editor (vscode works well) to create a file called appmanifest_3146520.acf containing the following:

"AppState"
{
    "AppID"  "3146520"
    "Universe" "1"
    "installdir" "WEBFISHING"
    "StateFlags" "1026"
}

save the file and then re-open steam. you should see a Download button appear and offer to install the game files.

after the game has installed, open the local files for the game like so:

step 3 - download godot steam export templates

webfishing uses an extension of the godot engine called GodotSteam to interface with steam. we will need to download an export template for a mac game, so we can repack webfishing into a mac version.

go to https://godotsteam.com/, and scroll down until you find "Godot 3 Pre-compiled Editors and Templates"

click it and download the zip file beginning with "macos". do not click Source code! this will give you the wrong download

after downloading the zip file, unzip it by double clicking. it should have a folder inside of it with 2 more zip files. unzip the one called macos.zip. this should then give you a strange app file called osx_template. drag this to your desktop!

step 4 - cram webfishing inside this file

right click on the file and click "Show package contents". this will take you inside the app file. there's a couple steps of setup we need to do before we can run the game.

go to your WEBFISHING steam files

UPDATE 12/11/2024: as of a recent update, the webfishing.pck file has been removed. you can work around this by renaming the webfishing.exe to webfishing.pck - trust me it works somehow. if you get an error later about "Couldn't load project data", make sure you've renamed the exe file properly (right click > Get Info). additionally, the steam_appid.txt file was removed. just make your own textfile containing 3146520

1. copy the webfishing.pck file. put it inside Contents/Resources in the app package.
2. copy the steam_appid.txt file to Contents/MacOS in the app package.
3. go to Contents/MacOS folder in the app package and rename the godot_osx_release.64 file to webfishing
4. delete the godot_osx_debug.64 file in the game folder

finally, open the Info.plist file in Contents inside the app package, and paste this in:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>
	<string>English</string>
	<key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
	<string>webfishing</string>
	<key>CFBundleName</key>
	<string>webfishing</string>
	<key>CFBundleDisplayName</key>
	<string>WEBFISHING</string>
	<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
	<string>icon.icns</string>
	<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
	<string>info.webfishing.webfishing</string>
	<key>CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion</key>
	<string>6.0</string>
	<key>CFBundlePackageType</key>
	<string>APPL</string>
	<key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key>
	<string>1.0</string>
	<key>CFBundleSignature</key>
	<string></string>
	<key>CFBundleVersion</key>
	<string>1.0</string>
	<key>DTPlatformBuild</key>
	<string>14C18</string>
	<key>DTPlatformName</key>
	<string>macosx</string>
	<key>DTPlatformVersion</key>
	<string>13.1</string>
	<key>DTSDKBuild</key>
	<string>22C55</string>
	<key>DTSDKName</key>
	<string>macosx13.1</string>
	<key>DTXcode</key>
	<string>1420</string>
	<key>DTXcodeBuild</key>
	<string>14C18</string>
$usage_descriptions
	<key>NSHumanReadableCopyright</key>
	<string>meow</string>
	<key>CFBundleSupportedPlatforms</key>
	<array>
		<string>MacOSX</string>
	</array>
	<key>NSPrincipalClass</key>
	<string>NSApplication</string>
	<key>LSApplicationCategoryType</key>
	<string>public.app-category.games</string>
	<key>LSMinimumSystemVersion</key>
	<string>10.12</string>
	<key>LSMinimumSystemVersionByArchitecture</key>
	<dict>
		<key>x86_64</key>
		<string>10.12</string>
	</dict>
	<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
$highres
</dict>
</plist>

if you're trying to hack together a game that isn't webfishing, change the names as needed. make sure CFBundleExecutable matches the name of the renamed godot_osx_release.64.

at this point, your app package should look like this:

we're not quite done yet however, as macOS thinks this app is broken, so we need to fix it.

step 5 - this aint fix a fish

right now if you try and run the webfishing file you'll probably get a popup like this:

to fix this, we need to tell macOS to stop giving a fuck. open the Terminal and type the following:

sudo xattr -cr [path to your webfishing.app file]

to get the path to your webfishing file easily, you can drag and drop the app file from Finder onto the terminal window and it will autofill something looking like this:

sudo xattr -cr /Users/mae/Desktop/webfishing.app

press enter and you should be prompted for your password (it wont show as typed in the window so just type it and press enter).

step 6 - fish

after that, make sure steam is open and then double click the file. webfishing should open!

if you need to transfer save data from a pc, the paths are as follow:

• Windows - C:/Users/user/AppData/Roaming/Godot/app_userdata/webfishing_2_newver
• macOS - /Users/user/Library/Application Support/Godot/app_userdata/webfishing_2_newver

over a few years, i've been occasionally asked over discord and wherever by new people that want to get into making music on some good free resources for doing so. this is my comprehensive guide on the best free shit on the internet.

just a disclaimer, of course there's always the option of sailing the seven seas for software, but for legalities sake i won't be covering that here. support small developers if you can!

small heads up, a lot of these free bundles can require accounts for seperate companies (eg. Native Instruments requires an account to download their launcher) so if you're insanely turned off by the idea of that, this might not be for you

🖥️ DAWs (digital audio workstations)

due to the huge scope of DAW software, the harsh truth is that it's difficult to get something featureful for free. there are some free DAWs out there, but generally they lack a lot of the features and polish of offerings from more established companies.

if you're looking for a good first option to spend money on, i'd recommend Cockos REAPER. a license only costs $60 and it's a really good DAW for the price. only issue is that there is a lack of pre-installed plugins

i made a full sheet comparing prices of every major DAW if you're intrigued to look for something yourself! https://wetdry.world/@mae/111759592599117109

Free

• Ardour
• LMMS

i've personally found LMMS to be a bit shakey (lack of ASIO audio due to licensing) and only really good for certain types of music (it comes with a lot of chiptune-y instruments!)

• GarageBand (macOS only)
• Audacity

as of writing Audacity is more of a simple audio editor, but the team seems to be working on overhauling it so it might become viable in future!

Trials

• Ableton Live (30 days)
• FL Studio (forever, but you can't reopen saved projects)
• REAPER (only shows a 10 second popup after the trial is up)
• Logic Pro (90 days, macOS only)

🎹 synthesizer plugins

• whatever comes with your DAW!
  • FL users: don't forget about Sytrus / Harmor / 3xOsc!
  • Ableton users: take a look at Operator / Wavetable / Drift
• Vital - awesome free wavetable synth functionally similar to the popular Xfer Serum
• Dexed - free synth plugin modeled after the iconic Yamaha DX7
• Surge - pretty comprehensive free and open source synth
• Magical8BitPlug - free plugin designed to make 8 bit gameboy-like sounds
• MeowSynth - just for fun :3

🎺 sound libraries

• Komplete Start - includes a generous helping of free instruments and effects from native instruments and the free Kontakt player needed for some other free libraries (requires account)
• Spitfire LABS - a ton of high quality free instruments from Spitfire Audio (requires account)

after you hear the labs soft piano you start spotting it everywhere

• Spitfire BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - the most well known free orchestrial library there is (requires account)
• Decent Sampler - sampler plugin that lets you playback Decent Sampler libraries which can be found on their website or on sites like pianobook
• Pianobook - lots of free instrument libaries for various other sampler plugins (Decent Sampler, Kontakt, Ableton Sampler)
• sforzando (or Fruity SoundFont Player) can playback SF2 files, which you can find on https://musical-artifacts.com. here's some cool ones:
  • EarthBound (now you too can harness the power of toby fox)
  • Microsoft GS Wavetable Synthesizer
  • SGM Soundfont
• FLEX in FL Studio has many good free sounds

🎛️ effect plugins

• whatever comes with your DAW!
  • never underestimate the power of stock plugins
• Kilohearts Essentials - a free bundle of basically any basic effect you could want (requires Kilohearts account)
• MFreeFXBundle - meldaproductions have a bunch of free effects that are solid

notably in here is MAutoPitch which is probably the best free auto-tune plugin and MFreeformPhase which is really cool for sound design

• Xfer OTT - notorious extreme compression effect, literally the audio equivilent of glue
• ValhallaSuperMassive - amazing free combination reverb/delay with many different algorithms, good for long reverbs
• TAL plugins
• TDR Kotelnikov - free compressor plugin

misc

• Freesound is a great website to find tons of samples and sounds effect licensed under various means (sometimes CC0) (requires account)
• Presetshare has lots of great presets for synth plugins
• BBC Sound Effects
• Looperman (requires account)

at the end of the day, you don't need all of this to make good music, but sometimes it can be handy to have new sounds to play with, or a good set of effects to cover your bases

if you have any questions feel free to contact me 💜

you may have noticed recently that i’ve stopped using the name “Stringy” on Discord. i’ll explain why.

🍋 pomelo

(aka the codename for Discord’s new username system) is the main factor behind all of this. when i heard about the changes my mental plan for username priority was like this:

• mae (HIGHLY unlikely)
• stringy (likely but risky)
• etstringy

when i got around to changing my name, i was met with this delightful screen that i’m sure many of you saw as well:

i already knew “mae” was going to be unavaliable due to me being very very late in rollouts (i made my current account may 2017 and didnt qualify as a nitro user) so i didn’t even bother, but the username “stringy” was also taken unfortunately.

i actually tried dming the guy with the username just out of the chance that he didnt really care about the username but they wanted to keep it, which i was entirely fine with.

🏳️‍⚧️ being myself

before this all occured i had thought about choosing a different username, and even brought it up to a friend.

as it says in the message above, i don’t want to be known as “stringy” on a platform that’s really personal to me. discord is how i communcate with most of my friends and people calling me stringy always feels really weird as if im only representing my artist persona. stringy as an artist identity just feels really corporate to me in the way how i release music and have a logo that i always use and it feels more like an alias or a moniker rather than being myself.

on top of that some may know that “etstringy” is tied to my deadname and as a trans person i’d rather leave that behind than have it integrated into my usernames forever to come

⁉️okay wtf is this username then??

my new username is vimae, and i’ve jokingly decided it means “Very improved mae”. it’s loosely tied to the vi and vim text editors for linux, which i thought would be a funny reference considering i code a lot. it’s also short (5 letters)

• linux/nerd specific

  side note i still need to learn how to actually use vim, i’m still a nano user myself 😭

🐦 and other platforms?

i’m debating on whever to change my usernames on other platforms, here’s a list of what i’ve decided so far:

✅ Discord

see this entire page

✅ Mastodon / Calckey (Fediverse)

i’m already known as mae here! main (wetdry.world) alt (f.mae.wtf)

✅ Website

https://mae.wtf mentions my music stuff but im not known as stringy on there any more

✅ VRChat

my name’s changed on vrchat but is different from vimae

❓ Twitter

not too sure about twitter. vimae is taken so i wouldn’t be sure as what to put my username as. twitter is another of the places that i be my personal self in rather than my artist so potentially i could make a second account for music stuff and keep my current account as personal?

❓ GitHub

undecided yet but probably wont due to compatibility reasons

❌ YouTube

youtube is the home of all my music and where i publish the visuals + visualiser videos i make, username will not be changing there and will be staying as “stringy”. Stringy 2 may be renamed at some point but i dont know right now

❌ TikTok

i use tiktok to promote my music sometimes so i probably wont change my username there

❌ Spotify / Apple Music / SoundCloud

my artist name isnt changing

❌ Figma

probably won’t change on figma

Recently, I've had a constant issue. Members of my family seemed to appear in my doorway, never knocking while I'm busy streaming or programming. One day, I was bored just sitting and breathing in the fresh air from outside when I had an idea. The idea is that there would be some sort of doorbell outside my room, where any family member could ring and it would send a notification to my computer saying that someone is there, completely avoiding the shock of someone bursting in the room uninvited.

I had found an old iPad Mini (4th generation) lying unplugged for the better part of a year that I wanted to repurpose, and it was the perfect thing to use. It has a good-sized screen and a camera on the front, in case I wanted to later build in a sort of camera monitoring system to see who's there.

Technologies/Packages used:

For this project, I made a webapp which runs on the iPad and a server on my computer which pushes the notifications/hosts the webapp.

Tailwind CSS

I've only just discovered Tailwind recently and i've been using it more and thought it was a good idea to try to use it, seeming as this is a smaller project.

WebSockets

Something i've barely explored up until now and turned out to be easier to implement than i thought. I'm sending JSON over websockets using the ws NPM package

Node Notifier

An easy package I found to send Windows toast notifications and seems to use SnoreToast under the hood.

TypeScript

JavaScript with types, very nice to use especially with the auto complete in my IDE (which is of course Visual Studio Code)

I'm also using ts-node-dev to hot-reload my TypeScript code. It's like nodemon but for TypeScript

The interface

At the top, the current chosen status is displayed, along with an emoji next to it from the Twemoji emoji set. There are 5 different status states - Each has it's own seperate use and some remove the buttons from the interface.

1. Available
2. Busy
3. Streaming
4. Sleeping
5. Away

There are 4 main buttons, they all send different messages into the notification but they mainly all accomplish the same job which is to send a notification over the WebSocket. COVID-19 test is there because I am required to do COVID-19 tests by my educational institution, and one of my parents usually ends up setting it up for me and then giving me the swab to take the sample. I am using Boxicons for the icons in the buttons, as one of my friends recommended it to me and they had a good range of icons.

In addition to that, the current time is also displayed in the top left to be publicly displayed incase people can't look at any of the 20 other devices that display the time. Finally, the current version is displayed in the bottom left for debugging purposes, and tapping the version number will reload the page, useful when the application is running in Apple's PWA mode where there are no browser controls whatsoever.

How I built it

First I worked on the web interface, I went through many different iterations trying VueJS, React but ultimately in the end I just settled on going back to basics and just writing a static HTML page. After all, there aren't many things in the page that I need to componentize.

After I got the basic idea of the interface done, I started on writing the backend. I'm using Express to serve the static HTML and the WebSocket was actually way easier than I thought it would be to implement. It uses some switch statements on the server and the client to change the response based on the opcode and stores the status in variables.

While storing the status in variables is a great way to call them later, I had a concern that what if my machine lost power or I just stupidly closed the program by accident somehow? To combat that, I decided to store the status in a JSON file as well as in the variable, so it can be loaded when the program is started up again.

/**
 * Save status and sleep time to JSON file
 */
const save = () => {
  fs.writeFileSync(dataPath, JSON.stringify({
    status, sleepTime
  }));
}

/**
 * Load status and sleep time from JSON file in
 * case of loss of power or app shutdown
 */
const load = () => {
  const _data: Buffer = fs.readFileSync(dataPath);
  const data: KnokData = JSON.parse(_data.toString());

  status = data.status;
  sleepTime = data.sleepTime;
}

As you might be able to see above, I'm also storing data of when the status was changed to Sleeping, so everyone can see how awful my sleep schedule is because I thought it would be a useful thing to display.

Finally as it was time to run the webapp on the iPad, I added this meta tag to my HTML Head to enable the iPad to not show the Safari controls when the website was "added to the home screen"

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

And it worked! I showed the other people in my house and plugged in the iPad to stay docked on a shelf outside my office.

Looking to the future

In future, I am planning to add the following features

• Web panel so I can set my status easily
• Cooldown on the Urgent button
• More buttons menu to add more notification variety

The source code is available on GitHub here - https://github.com/etstringy/knok

Thanks for reading! 🚀