Perhaps we should all keep and maintain a Linux machine in the event that Apple and Microsoft both decide to screw us over.
20 years ago, the type of person analogous to a typical HN type would have been on Linux. Thread after thread on places like Slashdot started from a position of Linux advocacy as a common baseline. Then in the early 2000s there was a massive shift to Mac among those types.
Personally, I miss the days of rank and file in such communities being desktop Linux advocates. We lost something of our soul.
I think a lot of us just end up with Macs because work IT hates the idea of managing Linux machines and macOS gets you 95% of what you need.
Many of us end up with Linux precisely because work IT doesn't manage Linux machines. (What's worse is when they think they can manage Linux machines.)
But that aside. The free unix-like desktop has a lot of choices to be made, and one person's setup isn't going to be the same as another's. To me, that is the opposite of looking down on somebody for what they use, if we all agree that these are legitimate choices. And there is a little bit of a spirit that if something is lacking, you can try to pave your own way, which I don't see as a bad thing, though I can see others rejecting it.
If anything I think the current community is a little too homogeneous, with a lot of people opting for stock Ubuntu or whatever, than it used to be, and that's a criticism I would make.
[0] and in fact I have a higher quantity of my devices running a Linux Desktop than I do Windows, but my main rig is Windows and that's unlikely to change for many reasons.
Agreed, and I am a Linux user. I would much rather spend my time with people who are interested in using Linux rather than promoting it. The discussions are much more meaningful. Besides, evangelists from one side tends to attract evangelists from the other side (with each side being as bad as the other). Once that happens, annoying advocacy tends to transform into belittling bickering.
I'm just trying to detangle the type of graphics being mentioned. I do wish Nvidia drivers were better, but maybe that'll happen with ROCs coming out soon.
Get AMD. Why do people insist on getting Nvidia cards and then complain that those aren't aimed at them? Get the one that is selling to you.
At least that is the reason i get Nvidia GPUs.
So the question remains valid: what are the GPUs being sold with super short warranties, and are they even worth buying in the first place?
One year was the best you'd get, 90 days was common.
Also, on Linux, AMD's OpenGL implementation - which is just Mesa - is very high quality.
So they are not following spec, and that's a good thing?
So please just stop telling us to get AMDs. That trades a small issue for a bigger one. Nvidia is selling is 90% of what we want and we're annoyed that they just don't care about that other 10%.
That said, I only use it a couple times a month. If I had to run it professionally, I'm not sure I'd be down.
Inkscape is similar - everything is a little harder to do - and there's some basic things that don't seem to be in the application at all. Does Inkscape support multiple artboards yet? What about exporting multiple resolutions without duplicating the assets? The symbol support also was very lackluster when I used it last.
Krita lags horribly every time I've tried to use it.
I like the notion that there are open source replacements for these systems.. and I'd love to drop my $50+ per month subscription - but the alternatives aren't yet equivalents.
Basically, yes, it hurts, but maybe try using it more? It's certainly better than nothing, which is what we may have if, I dunno, Adobe collapses or something crazy and all our Photoshop licenses suddenly stop working.
I actually feel the exact opposite - it's easier to use than Photoshop - but that's probably because I used GIMP before I ever had access to Photoshop.
100% agree about Inkscape, though.
Krita: Constant random crashes, like seemingly every complex Qt application.
Inkscape: I grew up on CorelDraw so maybe I just have the wrong set of expectations, but the UX is full of papercuts and inexplicable choices. For just one example that annoyed me recently, it seemed completely impossible to get snapping to grids and guidelines to behave; some objects would just refuse to snap to certain targets (different set for each object), and generally the snapping seemed to be based on arbitrary "basepoints" (only one per object; can you change those?) rather than bounding boxes.
(Blender, brought up elsewhere: actually quite good (modulo maybe the confusing refcounting/resource management), once you get on top of the learning curve. I hope 2.8, which I haven't tried yet, hasn't changed this.)
This is what macOS does, and does it well. Aqua/Quartz (is it still called that?) doesn't support (or at least doesn't encourage) MDI either, but unlike Windows it's app-centric instead of document-centric, which can annoy some Windows users when ALL of an app's windows come to front when they click on its icon in the dock.
Also, when you're making artwork on a deadline, fooling with virtual machines and things like that just doesn't make sense. There are just too many moving parts. Having to deal with layers of technology is a serious impediment to letting your creativity flow.
I first installed Linux off of floppies in the mid-90s on a hand-me-down 486— my distaste for that workflow isn't born from lack of experience or technical knowlege— it's born from the knowledge of the very real consequences of having an overly complicated toolchain when doing time-sensitive work.
Still though, also have my stack of MacBooks.
Apple becoming a Unix vendor lured me to their hardware, which functions as a terminal server in most regards, for my needs. For everything else, there's a fat Linux machine.
Windows: just, no. Only use it if I get paid to use it.
I pull them out a few times a year for that odd doc or onerous requirement.
Otherwise I've been happy with debian for a decade.
It's already happened.