I use FLAC for long-term storage, 256kbps Ogg when transcoding for mobile devices.

Opus is the best lossy codec in terms of efficiency, but many devices/apps don’t properly support it.

Except Debian is neither interesting nor innovative.

Also, for people on distros that don’t have an OOTB solution like OpenSUSE have, I recommend snapper and btrfs-assistant. You just install both packages, open the assistant GUI and create a profile for your root partition.

You can then also install a snapper plugin for your package manager, if one exists (I know DNF and pacman have one), which automatically take pre/post snapshots like OpenSUSE does, so you can quickly roll back if something goes wrong after a particular update/install/removal.

I’ve been using the above with EndeavourOS for a year now and it’s come in very handy on a couple of occasions.

I disagree.

On the flip side, I don’t consider OpenSUSE, Fedora, or Debian to be all that beginner-friendly either.

Nah they got it right the first time.

For your use case, I’d go with LosslessCut as opposed Shotcut, Openshot, etc.

The reason being that it is much simpler and faster to use, and generally results in smaller filesizes because you aren’t having to re-encode from scratch.

Going from 192kbps to 320kbps would be audibly negligible unless you used a really bad codec to begin with, in which case adding AI into the mix would likely just compound the problem.

Probably not even worth it, tbh.

You can easily get away with more than one or two. I typically run between eight and ten and have rarely had any issues surrounding updates.

It’s really just as simple as waiting a week or two after a new Gnome version drops before you update. By then, the vast majority of the more popular extensions will have already fixed any compatibility issues or, if not, there’s a very good chance that an outdated extension can be replaced by a newer alternative.

I meant originally. The version above was taken from an unofficial source.

It was presumably designed for old CRT monitors with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Either way, it’s not 2005 any more.

I’m sorry, but you are either blind or crazy.

OpenSUSE maintainers: hold my beer!

If I were you, I would stick to streaming in that case.

However, if you’re dead set on storing files locally and there’s no other option but to transcode, then use 128kbps Opus instead of AAC - assuming that iPhones support it (I haven’t checked). It’s a lot more efficient.

A good converter program to use is fre:ac but don’t ask me for an iOS only app because I’m not an Apple guy at all.

Converting from one lossy codec another isn’t generally recommended, plus you aren’t likely to save that much disk space by converting to AAC.

10 GB is actually pretty small for a local music collection, quite honestly. If I were you, I would try to expand your storage capacity instead of wasting time, and potentially audio quality, by transcoding.

Why would I use KDE when Gnome is better? 😉

The GSConnect extension enables the same functionality on Gnome, btw.