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Comment by GlenTheMachine | Hacker News Reader

It's a little ironic, but I find Linux to be perfect for two groups of people: the nearly computer illiterate, and coders. It's all the people in between where it struggles.

Yes, if you need your computer to check email and visit websites, and maybe deal with digital photos and do a little light word processing, Linux is rock solid stable and more than up to the task. I can see my own mother being just fine with it for those purposes.

Conversely, if you need to roll some scientific HPC code, it's the preferred solution.

But God help you if you need to do multimedia desktop publishing or do Photoshop-level editing of photos or (in my case) do anything requiring a Common Access Card.

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> It's a little ironic, but I find Linux to be perfect for two groups of people: the nearly computer illiterate, and coders.

I started using Linux around '99 as a computer-illiterate and became a coder. I see no irony in this. One of RMS' goals was to have the ability to study and learn from the software and systems you were using.

That, I feel led to the ubiquity of high-quality documentation and materials - an embarrassment of riches. I ordered physical copies of TLDP (two phone books, in size). I read the slackware manual and learned the basics of how filesystems work and networking (culminating in redirecting X from my single good computer to a couple of dumpster-worthy systems on my home network). I didn't need to fork over money I couldn't afford for a compiler.

It left me with the lasting bias that free software is liberating and proprietary software leads to learned helplessness.

>One of RMS' goals was to have the ability to study and learn from the software and systems you were using.

This is a huge understated benefit of Linux and FOSS. Instead of being hidden you can see how things work, sometimes you might even need to fix them

>It left me with the lasting bias that free software is liberating and proprietary software leads to learned helplessness

I must admit, I do understand this sentiment. Working in a proprietary system its harder to imagine how I would want to change things to better work for you, because I can't see how it works. I wouldn't know what to change because I don't know what's in there, it makes things more difficult to see all the possibilities with the lack of information

In theory, sure. But this requires that you be a coder, effectively, and not just a coder but a coder with time on his/her hands.

If I'm a professional photographer I'm paid essentially by throughput. The more pictures I take, edit, and post, the more money I make. I literally can't afford to dive into the source for GIMP to try to customize my workflow, even if I had the coding skills to do so.

And that's my point really. Yes, IF I'M A CODER, Linux is superb. But if I'm not, those benefits don't really benefit me.

To be clear, I personally am a coder. Even then, though, how many of us really have the time to debug Linux device drivers? I don't.

GlenTheMachine, I responded to you because what you said struck a chord in me. Were I a truth-sayer, dawn's light would once more meet your eyes.

Yet, I am split; in my older, enervated state, I simply want my tools to get the fuck out of my way. But that is mediated by my understanding of "the way", which was informed by the myriad practitioners eager to spill the secrets of how things really work (i.e. de rerum natura), and to them I give my eternal thanks.

As a photographer, perhaps you can empathize with the likes of Edgard Varèse or Charles Ives. Ives decided to earn his filthy lucre in insurance so that he could write a symphony (the rehearsal of which was hired out to the BSO) in which the 4th trumpet had but one note to play. The artistic and idealistic in a single 4th trumpet tone.

If, on the other hand, you are saying you are owed some factory for your blind impress to stamp out mercantile -- here we part company. Have at you whatever promised fiefdom the FAANG (or is it MANGA) might, of its own beneficence carve out for you.

Have at you: be you artist or manufacturer?

> I'm paid essentially by throughput

I’ll take it down a notch and start with I agree with both of you.

One thing that maybe is more clear as I have aged, it’s obvious that my lifetime isn’t going to be long enough to see the changes that are most necessary and desired.

> One thing that maybe is more clear as I have aged, it’s obvious that my lifetime isn’t going to be long enough to see the changes that are most necessary and desired.

This is the end game and the reason why many opensource programmers work the way they do, not only to scratch their own itch, but to instead leave the world in a better digital state than what they found it.

Like, I'm a professional C++ coder for living, but whenever something breaks in Linux I don't even know where to start fixing it. I'd just rather not deal with it.

You can also pay someone else to work on the GIMP for you. You don't have that option for Photoshop.

If you pick your hardware somewhat carefully you won't have to waste time into it.

I feel like the misconception Linux tends to break is because of Ubuntu. It's easily the most popular distribution and every time I had the misfortune of working with it I run into packaging issues and upgrade issues every 6 months.

Once I switched to rolling release distros I had way less problems.

> This is a huge understated benefit of Linux and FOSS. Instead of being hidden you can see how things work, sometimes you might even need to fix them

This is a little like calling a dilapidated home a "handyman's dream." The vast majority of computer users want to accomplish their task with minimal fuss, not learn about computers.

> Instead of being hidden you can see how things work, sometimes you might even need to fix them

Well, using proprietary system as a child made me a reverse engineer instead :P

I've stopped using desktop Linux at home because it's, unsurprisingly, a rather complex system with lots and lots of moving parts (moreover, some of the parts tend to get replaced often) and it has some annoying UI issues I consider unacceptable. I did some research and concluded that proper fixes for these issues are effectively insurmountable for a very-part-time developer like me, and workarounds will just keep breaking. Sure, I can read the code, I understand how the system works to some extent, but actually changing it requires orders of magnitude more energy.

> It left me with the lasting bias that free software is liberating and proprietary software leads to learned helplessness.

That’s totally it and I’m very concerned about the current/future generations of people who are using fully locked proprietary hardware as their main computer.

I have the feeling that this creates an artificial barrier between technology literates and the rest of the world. Sure, it’s probably good for my career but it sounds terribly wrong to live in such a dystopian world.

Even the grandmother of the author is very lucky. Because once your grandmother of the future buys the cheapest Surface/Chinese android tablet… good luck installing Linux on this.

They will do as we did 40 years ago, buy books and software.

I started using someone else's Linux in 1993, remotely, to help him port a user space threading library written in C to it. The machine was at the guy's house, online via SLIP.

Several people in the computer lab were standing behind my back, watching me live code the x86 context switching routines in GNU syntax (which I knew from coding some graphics demos using the DJGPP environment supporting writing extended DOS (DPMI) programs with GCC).

Yeah, I agree with this. Linux Desktop is fine if what you need is essentially a web kiosk, and if you happen to be doing webdev work or a few other coding disciplines. It's all the many and varied other usecases that exist where it falls down hard, and the really unfortunate part is that when you express that this is why you don't use it the community seems flabbergasted that you don't just want a web kiosk and aren't a webdev. It's kind of maddening.

It’s come a long way for other uses, though. We have decent 3D modeling, paint, office suites, and gaming (better than Mac, almost as good as Windows). It’s still not quite there, I’ll grant it, but it does feel miles closer than the last time I used Linux (a decade or so ago).

It will never be there. Adobe and Microsoft won’t allow it. There can’t be a replacement for industry standard tools (like Word, Excel, Illustrator, Premiere) unless the replacement becomes the new standard.

Linux desktop is very big in VFX at least.

Except the little details that to work around the usual fragmentation, the VFX industry created a standard for what is supposed to be a VFX workstation, and they couldn't care less about the proprietary nature of Nvidia drivers.

> There can’t be a replacement for industry standard tools (like Word, Excel, Illustrator, Premiere) unless the replacement becomes the new standard

I thought about this in the past and disagree. You can already see it with google docs. Office file format interop is becoming irrelevant because the new format is just an url you point your browser to. I worked at a company that used gdocs and had a total of 0 complaints about sending customers a link to a gdoc instead of a docx attachment. There is no need for an industry standard anymore.

As for adobe tools, ok they might still be an issue currently.

Google docs is useable if what one expects from a word processor is being a digital typewriter with Write like features.

The people needing advanced features of Office are a tiny minority

Except each minority wants a different set of Office features.

It's like that now, but Google Docs will eventually start moving in on Word's more sophisticated feature set.

Sure, like it has already done so for the last decade.

Google docs, Office online and Adobe cloud are giving these a run for their money. Adobe cloud is probably the least successful of three purely due to price and high piracy levels.

I believe Premiere is very popular for mid-range stuff, but it's not really the "industry standard". If that was anything, I think it'd probably be Avid Media Composer. Linux has (freemium / non-Free) Davinci Resolve, which is increasingly popular in the mid range, across all the main platforms.

Edit: The multimedia things I find really painfully missing in Linux are Izotope RX9 and Kontakt.

Do you use Bitwig?

Never tried it. For recording (which I have to admit I haven't done any of for a while) I mostly use Ardour.

Those programs have certainly gained a lot of features in the past 10 years. But they're just as user-unfriendly as they were before. Look at OpenOffice from 10 years ago vs LibreOffice today. The window is more cluttered with buttons and toolbars, but the experience for a MS Office or Mac Write user who sits down for the first time is about the same.

Windows/MacOS are great for developing native software for the respective platform. For virtually every other development scenario i can think of, Linux is imho the weapon of choice, not just web development.

How about editing or colour grading a commercially-released movie?

OTOH, Blender and DaVinci Resolve have first class support for Linux.

How many people are doing that? But as to your question, wasn’t the original high-performance version of Da Vinci Resolve only available on Linux?

You’d use a specific workstation, not a general purpose counter. That workstation is probably something like a quantel rio,

Rio was apparently Quantel's last ever product, released seven years ago. These days I don't think there's any reason to use specialist computing hardware, although if you're high-end you'd have a bunch of specialist input devices and calibrated HDR monitors.

Oh yea they were bought by grass valley. Been a long time since I was in that area.

Nobody is grading on a laptop, they are doing it in a proper post production suite with a dedicated workstation, same with audio, and editing

DaVinci Resolve is historically a Unix (IRIX) program, and works best on Linux; post-houses who have dedicated Resolve workstations generally use Linux.

> colour grading a commercially-released movie

I'm wondering if you deliberately picked an example where the undisputed industry standard runs on Linux.

I didn't! I had no clue. I'm even surprised Linux has good support for the colour space needed for colour grading.

No, that's just plain wrong. Me, my family and everyone in my company use Linux exclusively for everything, and did so for the past 15 years. We use it for photo editing as well as CRM, video editing as well as videoconferencing, gaming as well as office management, etc.

But at what cost? What did your family give up in terms of time, money, mental load, and having to do things on Android or iOS because we use Linux in this household?

Sure, it seems to work well enough for you, but what are you asserting? That everyone else who is claiming Linux Desktop isn't a good fit for what they use a computer for is intellectually lazy?

I think that's a trap Linux Desktop evangelists have fallen into because they can't stand to recognize the truth that maybe a collection of fragmented pseudo-platforms cobbled together from disparately developed software --mostly by hobbyists-- just isn't actually as good at a lot of things as something developed by one well funded professional team as an actual platform.

I think the way some of the Linux Desktop community denigrates people who don't use it and pretends that there are no legitimate reasons anyone reasonably competent wouldn't is doing the community as a whole a great disservice and has been for twenty years. Not only are they driving otherwise interested parties away, but they're also refusing to admit to deep seeded problems that subsequently are never addressed.

No I'm asserting that people are more comfortable and productive with the system they know best. I'm just saying that I know many people who are perfectly happy and productive using MacOS, or Linux, and that your dismissive comment was pretty rude and uninformed.

That's wrong.

Linux works for myriad of usecases the same way that windows and macos do. And it sucks at a fraction of other ones but windows and macos do too suck big times at other things.

The difference with my grandmother and most average people is she hasn't been forced through school and work to the windows or mac ecosystem. She wasn't used to software x and y. When she asked how to do things, she didn't have any preconceptions. Resistance to change is the main deterrent to people. Most people used to amiga or atari suffured when they had to learn windows. Most people are struggling a bit when switching to MacOS, I sure do as well. The difference is you seallow it easily because you actually bought a freaking expensive equipment and feel forced to get used to it. While if you are just a format + reinstall away from windows you will just not have the patience to dedicate the time to discover the UI, shortcuts and softwares to achieve the same thing but with a slightly different workflow.

If anything, Linux and the BSD have never struggled from unsolvable usability or compatibility issues, provided the hardware was chosen carefully, they struggled because they are free, are installable on commodity hardware already sold with other OS and thus aren't taken seriously.

I agree the usability issues of Linux are not unsolvable, they're just unsolved and have been for 20 years because the Linux Desktop community in general isn't that interested in solving them.

My parents used a Linux desktop for years in the late '90s and '00s, mostly because it was substantially easier for me to help provide support for. The only reason they no longer do is because tablets are simply a much more convenient form factor to do virtually everything they need to do on a daily basis.

There is a point at which usability is not about the specific interface, but that it's about applications and the OS being consistent. I, as someone using and programming computers for upwards of 40 years now feel that software is getting harder to use: it is less and less consistent while features are more and more difficult to discover. I hate the direction Gnome has taken where almost everything about the UI gets thrown out and re-written every few years, with features that I use simply disappearing. I hate newer versions of iOS where more and more gestures are added, while things like the home button are now gone and my phone pocket dials or turns on the light if I put it in my pocket the wrong way (which wasn't a problem in the first few generations). UI changes take mental resources away from the task at hand as one has to figure out how to do something that was easy to do before. An interface that that looks hard to use initially may well end up being easier to use if it is consistent and discoverable.

My number 1 UI complaint about GUIs these days is about the complete lack of keyboard shortcuts. Google Earth is one of the worst offenders: so many of the menus and dialog boxes have no keyboard shortcuts. The ridiculous part is that the Amiga did better on this measure more than 30 years ago. There was even an official Amiga User Interface Style Guide published in 1991 that spelled out how apps should look and feel. Even most MS-DOS apps had a consistent style to their interfaces and menus with shortcuts. MacOS may be one of the few in which menus remain fairly consistent and discoverable.

I now understand why the greybeards were grumpy with us young whippersnappers going and replacing the world. I am become one.

I don't agree either. I have been using Linux as a primary desktop for 24 years and I don't have any major issue. I have a lot however, when I am using a Windows computer.

Try gaming then. Linux for gaming sucks. It’s been improving but it’s still dogshit. Especially with how games are always updating now and are constantly adding new content/changes. Drivers are often terrible too.

Gaming on computers is such an edge case for a tiny fraction of the population, the hardcore gamers. Most people simply don't even have a powerful enough computer to run AAA games anyway and buy a playstation, xbox or switch to play games.

And I always had fun playing hedgewars on linux with some friends, thank you.

It is funny you mention drivers because: - printing and scanning on my fedora laptops is a totally flawless and transparent experience, only requiring at the beginning to install a package which was pretty quick using gnome software. Doing the same on the windows laptop of my girlfriend required spending 10 minutes getting the correct driver on the manufacturer website, installing the drivers including a ton of random unneeded software, rebooting the laptop and now everytime she wants to print anything she gets some annoying popup windows. - the prior scanner I used for 25y before moving country was still perfectly supported on my linux distributions while the last available driver for windows was for windows 2000. Better hardware support from Linux actually allowed me to use my scanner more than 10y longer than if I had been using a Windows or Mac.

Some exotic hardware may not be supported at time of release on linux but all in all if you do your homework before shopping there is no issue.

You're kidding, right? PC gaming is huge.

Huge in money because gamers spend a tons of money on hardware and games.

It is not huge in term of % of computing users. Most computers sold are tablets and laptops without any decent GPU. Most people cannot run less than 10y olds AAA games (and many of those usually works well on linux with proton anyway).

> Most computers sold are tablets and laptops without any decent GPU.

Sure, but we're talking about desktop computers here.

It's just that most of the complaints about switching to Linux, i.e. it's hard to do X, are wrong. My dad won't try it because he can't run MSword. There's nothing you need to do in Word that can't be done as easily with Linux workflows. There are exceptions, but most of the time it's true. It does mean learning new workflows, but that's usually as hard as it feels.

I'm not a graphics person so I can't say if gimp can replace Photoshop, but a lot of little tasks I used to open Photoshop for on Mac are easily handled by GIMP or even imagemagick. The majority of users would be fine learning these tools.

It's where you take some anecdotes and then apply "most" and "the majority" to them that I really disagree with. There are a lot of serious computer users and professionals who would love to be using a FOSS OS free from all the bullshit of Microsoft and Apple, but are unable unable to because even if it is theoretically possible to do what they do on Linux, the headaches of doing so are just not worth it and it doesn't look like the Linux Desktop community is very interested in changing that because it is "good enough" as far as they are concerned.

The only development you can't do on Linux is Apple and maybe some Microsoft related stuff

Linux works great for a variety of computer applications, what you mention and others. It has problems on a variety of others but often can be made to work for many of those. Windows also has problems with quite a few applications but also can be made to work for them.

Windows has costs in terms of security and control. But to the end user, Windows is "free as in beer", even more than Linux, since it comes just sitting on your new machine and you only have to sign away vague "rights" to use it. So it's no surprise Windows wins.

I’ve always found that windows is free as in beer, but Linux is just some jerk handing you bunch of grain and hops and a vague diagram of what to do next. It’s free, and it’ll make beer, but it might also make weird oatmeal instead.

Depends on distribution. Ubuntu works quite well out of the box for a lot of hardware. It’s great for basic usage like editing docs, browsing the web etc.

I found that Manjaro just works, which is super confounding: Arch is supposed to be one of the nerdier distros. I've thrown Manjaro (and now pure Arch) at my Linux-hostile laptop, and everything works. Provided you have access to good internet Arch is almost like off-cloud-SaaS on your machine, and that model makes tons of sense for desktop usage.

Printers, the bloody cursed things, are far more reliable than Windows.

In terms of hardware support, Ubuntu comes really close. The Linux desktop has come very far in the past few years.

Good to know. I will give it a try too

I very recently took a look at Manjaro to replace Kubuntu and the fucking trashfire that is snap, but got stuck on several apps that I use all the time not being available through their repo. And yes, I could go all Gentoo and `configure && make install` but really... I no longer have the time and patience for that.

And sadly, no, I do not have good internet, so that's an interesting thing to note.

can you cite an example of missing app? my experience with Manjaro and Arch tells me you're doing somerhing wrong.

Quite likely you're right; I didn't spend time digging deep. I may yet make the switch...

Enable AUR: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository

You could also try Fedora, I ran that for a while and it's also really good.

Windows is free as in beer until it decides arbitrarily that you can’t output audio from certain applications on certain sound devices. Or how about arbitrarily deciding that the volume output on my headset should be 90% lower? Please go through a painful troubleshooting process that results in losing 15 minutes of your time and then having to reinstall the drivers anyway. By the way, did you need to change some audio settings? No not that audio control panel, the other one (changes in that audio control panel don’t actually have an effect)! Or that some wifi settings should just be hidden and inaccessible even from the command line (I mean who would need to set a static IP anyway). Or meh let’s not respect your selected times for scheduled updates and just do it whenever Windows wants (this will only take an hour or so ;). Oops, the start menu can’t search local applications anymore for some reason, but maybe bing search results will work. Did you want to pay $100 to upgrade this Windows 10 Home PC to Pro? Ok we charged your card. :( Something went wrong and we couldn’t complete the upgrade. Please proceed to spend 1 hour getting in touch with Microsoft support. Oh, we know it says you don’t need a license key and we didn’t send you one, but you actually need one so use this key.

And honestly all of this would be acceptable except I have zero control over what it’s doing. You can get this exact same experience on Linux except you have full control over everything. So just give me the weird Linux oatmeal, at least I can pick what spices go in it.

+1 - I laughed. (Haven't used Windows in 20 years, but it's all just so much deja vu)

BUT. I used to have full control. And then Ubuntu foisted snap on me and now I have to suffer the constant worry that snapd might choose to update some trivial piece of shit right when I need to be doing something actually important.

So, yes, I just did `sudo apt purge snapd` but now I'm stuck with messing with the oatmeal for a couple of applications, and that's likely to increase as time goes by.

I'm in the market for a new distro, but would prefer to stick with something based on Debian/apt because of the rich app ecosystem. Oh, and KDE.

I can’t say much about the KDE experience on Debian, but Debian with Gnome was my daily driver for many years and I didn’t have much trouble with it. I’m on more exotic distros as of late, but if something happens, I always have Debian to fall back on. My only problem with the Debian lineage is it holds me back on older software versions and their unstable is … unstable as advertised, haha.

Use Flatpaks instead.

I've found Fedora to strike a good balance between working out-of-the-box and getting out of my way when I want to customize it. I can't say how well KDE works because I don't use it but it is supported. With the half-year release cycle it stays fresher than Debian and I prefer DNF over APT anyway.

I've never had any issues with application support, but even in the worst case you can always run an Ubuntu container or something.

KDE on Fedora works great. I'm one of those people that has a hard time figuring out why people are complaining about desktop Linux. My Fedora+KDE does have some problems occasionally, but they are problems of my own making, such as compiling the entire graphics stack and kernel myself so I can use the cutting edge development versions...

Yeah, that's my experience too. Fedora generally just works unless I break it myself. This system has seen 5 or 6 major release upgrades and the only time I've had issues was when I let the root disk fill up mid-upgrade, and even then it was easy to fix without a reinstall thanks to dnf distro-sync.

Granted, I specifically chose my hardware to be Linux-compatible, which meant no nvidia and a bit of googling when choosing the motherboard, but even Windows would have issues with a lot of the shoddy hardware that's out there.

My hardware wasn't even selected for Linux compatibility. Also, I've done in-place upgrades on this PC for the last 6 years. I did skip some versions though.

As far as I can remember, nothing actually broke when doing upgrades ever.

I love Fedora's in-place system upgrade, and it just keeps getting better.

I persuaded my partner to switch to Linux, because Windows is increasingly hostile if you don't want online services, accounts and offers.

We went with Silverblue, because it Just Works™, it's simple to upgrade, and it's difficult to break (and it's what I've used for years now).

One of my criteria when recommending a distro is "if I leave them alone with it for 10 years, would it be EOL (or broken)?" and IMO Silverblue makes major version upgrades much simpler than Ubuntu.

If you want Ubuntu without snaps, run Pop_OS. I'm using it and it's really fine.

NixOS has been pretty good for me, but I wanted to learn Nix. I can repair issues a lat faster than other options and rollbacks are native.

I'd recommend looking at openSUSE tumbleweed. Best KDE integration IMHO. Well tested rolling release, snapshots on upgrade.

Mint w/Xfce works for me. They purge snap by default, and support debian/Ubuntu packages.

Actually I went a bit further and use i3 as WM. Tiling windows as God meant it to be.

At least Windows has audio.

Linux audio has been great IME. I’ve never had any of the weird problems I have using the Windows audio stack.

> Just some “jerk” handing you a vague diagram

Seriously ? , You look at docs provided by stuff like archiwiki, gentoowiki, man pages, tldr tools, whole bunch of other cool blogs helping you around with setting things up, entire web forums, matrix rooms, irc chats, mailing lists, and all sorts of other places to get help from.

And it is a jerk handing you a “vague” diagram?.

..... idk, if you can’t read a manual, then say so. A person doesn't become a jerk to provide you with one.

I understand linux/bsd variants of open source operating systems can be unviable/hard to use for people. Doesn't mean the builders become a jerk just because you cant match it to your usecase.

One might argue that you shouldn’t need a manual to do many of the things on Linux you definitely need a manual for.

Those who argue that , should not use the tools provided which definitely need a manual for.

There are extensive manuals and documents for those tools, because of the flexibility and freedom they provide, its a lot harder on windows to code a script to change my display screen's color tone , depending on my mood, time of the day, or any way i want to, meanwhile with xrandr and a bash script, its just 3 lines away from me.

To some people it might be unacceptable to even just operate with xrandr or similar such commandline tools, but then, why are you trying to use these tools in the first place ?, use mac, windows or a linux distro which is more hands free like Ubuntu, or Deepin or Pop_Os.

My point was someone isn't a jerk, for providing that flexibility or freedom, no one likes to write huge manuals or documents, they do it out of kindness to help others use their tools, I just think it's wrong to call people like that jerks.

And I'd argue that the need for manuals on Linux is greatly overstated.

Man, I was making a joke. Obviously maintainers of documentation aren’t jerks. I’m usually good at reading documentation. I’ve run Ubuntu on a laptop for a year or two in the past, but the headaches of audio and Wi-Fi drivers were beyond documentation, and well into SO and google rabbit holes.

Ultimately I gave up and reverted to Mac. If my choice was windows or Linux, I might choose Linux, but as long as I can keep Mac OS, I’ll probably not use either.

Ah okidoki, Meh linux , no linux both are ok, I’ve just had too many people genuinely call people jerks for providing foss tools that don’t meet their criterias....

Confused you with those, extremely sorry.

> handing you bunch of grain and hops

Which is still quite comfortable. Imagine you would have to wait one year for the grapes.

It is almost as if the people selling the software align thier product with the middle of the target market. And with only two big players (MS and Apple OSs) they inevitabbly coverge toward that middle until they are back-to-back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law

Let linux forever be the desktop of the not-middle. Keep linux different.

IMO people making software align the software with their motives. Generally, for proprietary software that's selling services to consumers and/or ad partners; for open source software that's making a useful tool.

> Yes, if you need your computer to check email and visit websites, and maybe deal with digital photos and do a little light word processing, Linux is rock solid stable and more than up to the task

I would go further and say that browsing, email, and light word processing doesn't require a laptop/desktop at all, whatever the OS - this is what a tablet (perhaps with some kind of keyboard) would be perfect for.

> or do Photoshop-level editing of photos

How far ahead is Photoshop when compared to Gimp for the type of editing an average Photoshop user does? Do people really find Gimp lacking?

Well, the average Photoshop user is a professional. I don't know if GIMP is lacking in features, but I definitely feel very out of place whenever I need to do anything. The features might be there, but either the UX is bad or I'm not used to it.

I've used GIMP way more often than Photoshop for the past two years, and I definitely don't feel any more at ease. The transform tool, for example, I always find unintuitive and hard, and everything else is more or less the same. It's a pity.

Yes, you’ll often see Gimp’s UX problems handwaved away as the user being too used to Photoshop, but it runs deeper than that.

Until GIMP fixes its UI to be usable to an average graphic designer, it's a complete non-starter. Until it gets CMYK editing and color separation, and nondestructive editing, it's a non-starter.

What's the point of CMYK? Your image is going to be displayed on a panel that has some form of red, green, and blue LEDs. For something like printing a picture you can always just have the printer do the conversion from RGB to CMYK.

Conversion isn’t a perfect process and often has undesirable effects on the image. This makes it necessary for documents intended for print to be created in CMYK.

How do you preview your image then? You have to have it in RGB for editing to show up on your monitor.

This is not a discussion worth having, there isn't good logic in any of the discussions with photoshop users, its pretty much going to come down to personal preference.

If by Photoshop users you mean print professionals, you're right. Arguing isn't worth your time. Adobe has built its reputation around actually listening to professional designers working in the print, film, and Web industries and adding features to their software to support workflows from those industries. GIMP... has not. (As another example also mentioned here, in addition to CMYK, Photoshop also knows about spot colors and can separate those for prepress as well.) Until GIMP gets actual, professional customers and really listens to them, it's a nonstarter in this space.

Working in CMYK lets you avoid the stage where everything looks muted when printed because you didn’t properly account for the different gamut, and because nobody knows how to properly set up conversions.

And beyond that, Adobe’s stuff knows about things like using spot inks outside of the RGB/CMYK spaces. Spot gloss, metallics, etc. Open source alternatives do not.

Though Krita[1] insists on advertising itself as a "painting program", it handles everything you listed: CMYK support,[2] color separation,[3] and non-destructive editing.[4] Krita supports both raster and vector layers as well. It's well-suited for graphic design, and its interface is more familiar to Adobe product users.

[1] https://krita.org

[2] https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_mode...

[3] https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/separate_image.ht...

[4] https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/layers_and_masks.html#...

If GIMP changed their UI we'd end up with drama and a fork.

The main reason I still use gimp as my daily driver is because it didn't change and I still am able to do things. Everytime I worked with Adobe products (every X years) it felt like learning a new software. Which i have zero interest in

What exactly is unusable about its UI beyond not being Photoshop and breaking muscle memory?

Like a good FOSS nerd (and cheapo), I tried to steer my daughter towards Gimp rather than shelling out for Photoshop. She dug in her heels, and eventually I was able to divine that the reason was, the internet is chock-full of tutorials on using Photoshop to do all the kinds of art she wanted to do. The number of equivalently-useful Gimp tutorials was effectively zero. That's when I gave in.

I guess a variant of the network effect?

heck, even as a seasoned developer currently learning my way around webdev, i tinkered a bit with roda and hanami (both of which are wonderfully designed frameworks), and ended up ditching them both for rails because that's where all the tutorials, articles and example code are.

And yet, GIMP could have an interface much more like Photoshop. There are commercial Photoshop clones on the market (Paint Shop Pro). Why do open-source devs always have to make something out in left field?

I have no problem using GIMP. The lack comes in when people send me Photoshop files. GIMP usually mangles them.

I was having a discussion with a proprietor of a software retailer many years ago. He was thoroughly annoyed by people who walked in and insisted upon getting Photoshop and complaining about the price of Photoshop when it was clear their needs would be met by an inexpensive alternative. What they needed was the brand name, not the tool. Sometimes that need for the brand name is legitimate, say when you want to learn a tool to pursue a career. Usually that need for the brand name is purely emotional.

I suspect that Gimp has all of the features needed for the typical editing done by an average user. In cases where it is ill suited to their needs, I suspect it is due to a steep learning curve because it follows an image editing model similar to Photoshop.

Photoshop has some really clever AI based tools that neither Gimp or Krita can match. For what I do, which is not manipulating photos for magazines, erasing objects and so on, Gimp has been overkill.

> Photoshop has some really clever AI based tools

Can you expound on these?

It does deep-learning based denoising and super resolution, de-blurring (as a result of camera shake or out-of-focus shots), sky replacement (e.g. if you took a shot on a "severe clear" day it can make your sky cloudy), and depth-aware haze removal. It can do auto-portrait touchups. It can automatically tweak a subject's apparent age and expression, it can transfer a style of makeup from one subject to another. It can adjust lighting in post, you can actually move the highlights and shadows around. Etc.

It's kind of amazing tbh.

Thanks, those sound pretty cool. I need to give modern Photoshop a spin one of these days, I haven't touched it since CS6.

Microsoft Image Composer came bundled with Frontpage (Microsoft's HTML editor from the 90's). It was easy to use and did nearly all the things an "average user", me included, would need. I used it all through the XP years. I've since learned to do most of what I need with GIMP.

one of the nice things about software going web-based (figma, for example) is that I don’t need to worry about the OS

I don’t know if gimp is lacking because I have no reason to use it. I need to use photoshop to work with other people using photoshop… we not only need to send each other files, but know the same interface, share scripts, etc…

Non-destructive editing is a big one for photo editing.

I found Photoshop CS6 from 10 years ago much more usable than Gimp. I was trying to do very basic things on Gimp and it was very hard or impossible. Like non destructive text editing or setup print size with ruler and markers. I think Gimp is fine to make some rough and quick edits but that's it.

I run Photoshop CC 2018 on Ubuntu 20.04 with WINE and it runs like a dream.

Anything earlier than 2018 won’t support high resolution displays and anything later is not currently supported by WINE, but Photoshop CC 2018 is very good.

Hey that's good to hear, I'm going to try it out later. I never succeeded to run photoshop on WINE until now. Did you had to do anything special?

I am using Play On Linux on Ubuntu 20.04. You can run CS6 without doing anything special, but if you want hires GUI then you need CC 2018. I set it up a while ago and don’t recall how much I had to do, but I pulled the latest Photoshop script from the Play On Linux website and modified it to point to my install.exe. I think the main thing was using a Windows XP base. Then once you open Photoshop you will have to disable in the preferences to disable automatic plugin updates or you will periodically get an annoying error message. Also set to hires in preferences. Other than those two things, it’s flawless. I run it almost daily. This stuff is all noted in the comments sections on the Play On Linux and WINE websites Photoshop versions pages, but admittedly there should be a guide somewhere. One last thing: I do not own the copy I am using because you can’t buy CC 2018 anywhere. Running the crack is done with the ‘Run an executable’ option in Play On Linux.

Not a professional in the area, but I follow gimp development for the last decade.

Biggest UI problems have been fixed by Peter Sikking and a few remaining will be fixed by the switch to gtk3 on version 3.0. Version 3.0 will also improve color management and, at least for a few non-professional cases, good enough CMYK.

Last remaining deficiency for me to suggest professional photographers to consider it is non-destructive editing (adjustment layers) which will (hopefully) be available in 3.2.

Interplanetary distances. My usual use case is editing 16k hdri's. Gimp can't do this, it simply crashes or grinds to a halt. I also spend a lot of time creating textures with filters. Gimp can't do this. Even editing a 4k texture barely works. Also digital painting sucks, tablet recognition is still terrible, and the UI is even worse than Photoshop's, which takes genuine, conscious effort and work on the part of the devs. The docs almost always show examples from several versions back with a different interface making them functionally useless. And it crashes. All. The. Time.

Even for ordinary photo retouching the experience is just worse.

Now darktable is a decent opensource alternative for Lightroom and parts of Photoshop for photo adjustment and if your aim is to make your photos look good rather than heavily manipulate them I would go with that. Krita is also ok for digital painting, although it has its issues.

I used Linux to play my music collection for a while, but it just had too many problems with crashing and randomly needing to regenerate its index. Windows Media Player just works.

Weird. Sounds like you had an issue with a buggy music player. What lead you to think the entire operating system was to blame?

A surprising lot of people consider a media player as part of the OS.

As a desktop replacement, I expect a music player, just like I expect a browser. The music player is a pretty good test of if the the operating system drivers work, although it was never clear if the music players were bad, or the sound drivers.

BTW, the music players on Roku, Grace Digital's streaming boxes, and Galaxy Audio's streaming boxes, are all unusable. The only ones that ever worked were the Turtle Beach Audiotron (now obsolete), and Windows Media Player.

I also have an Ubuntu desktop machine. It started pestering me to upgrade to a newer Ubuntu, and I finally relented and did. The new Ubuntu simply would not function with my graphics card. The old one worked fine with it. I spent a whole day trying to figure that one out, but there was no solution other than wiping the disk and reinstalling the older Ubuntu. A proper desktop replacement would:

1. warn me that I needed a new graphics card when pestering me to upgrade

2. refuse to install if I had a graphics card that was abandoned

I immediately uninstall the media players that come on any linux distro and install vlc, which is a magnificent piece of software

I've been burned by this. It was a result of nVidia deprecating support for my video card in new drivers, and Ubuntu only shipping up-to-date and compatible proprietary drivers in their latest releases. According to Canonical, this was because the nouveau driver has some support for the deprecated hardware and the old drivers were no longer compatible with up-to-date distros.

If that was your issue, there's scripts that patch support for newer distros into the old drivers.

It sounds like my issue.

If there are scripts that fix it, those scripts should be run automatically by the installer. Otherwise, it's just not a desktop replacement. I'm sorry to have to say this, but to call it a desktop replacement means it has to:

1. just work

2. failing that, detect the problem and explain what to do. Crashing is just not acceptable anymore.

I do support all the time for the D compilers. In my experience, if the install does anything but "just work", you immediately lose 50-90% of your users.

Every error path in the installer needs to be gone over and engineered to "just work". Messages like:

"Unknown Error: TXerr 66x53 failed, aborted"

are so 1980's :-/

No desktop operating system meets this criteria though, at least not if you allow user-defined hardware combinations.

I remember I had to do some hackery on a driver to get my sister's printer to work with her macbook/OSX.

I've had all sorts of issues with printers/scanners/random software combinations/drivers/failed automatic update crash loops(!)/etc with Windows.

The only operating systems that might meet the criteria are on tablets and phones (which are obviously not desktops) -- and even then I've had to cross-compile a kernel module to support a wifi adapter w/ USB OTG.

Honestly I'll take that google-able error code over the modern trend of "The software has did a sad, please try again or contact our useless support".

The current Windows Media Player is a bloated mess with unnecessary features. Not unlike iTunes.

The original WMP was pretty good! But you really can no longer get anything like it. ETA: at least under active development. WMP Classic was a suitable replacement I used to use: https://mpc-hc.org/

Full disclosure: for music I still run Winamp 2.95, and for video it is a mix of Kodi for set top boxes and VLC for PC/Mobile.

I resort to VLC media player for music for the same reason.

I'd recommend checking out foobar2000. It feels old in a good way and you can use a lot of the Winamp plugins if you want them for whatever reason. No fancy nonsense, just a music player. There are also plugins to integrate with streaming services, youtube, etc for when you want something outside of your library.

Foobar2000 is good example of what a productive snappy user experience should be. It plays music, what else do you want it to do?

In addition to playing I use Foobar2000 for tagging, ripping, managing and converting.

>Not unlike iTunes

iTunes is dead although its replacements aren't much better.

https://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/

Is it REALLY possible for a media player to be "bloated" to the point that it matters (for playing music), when even the cheapest new PC has 8GB of RAM, 4 cores, and an SSD?

I can appreciate the performance aspect of your perspective here. But, if it takes up way too much screen real estate, it matters. If I spend extra time navigating a bad UI, it matters.

Interestingly, the dev tools on Linux are rock solid. The other stuff, not so much. Hence Windows is my desktop, where I have putty text windows into my Ubuntu machine for dev work.

Aren't you still using Ubuntu 14, or am I remembering a thread from too long ago.

"Modern" Ubuntu is absolutely rock solid as my work machine, the current iteration of the windows media player is total rubbish compared to VLC which does actually work with just about everything.

Interestingly, this Linux box is the first machine I've had with which the suspend actually works reliably, unlike every windows machine I've used.

As I mentioned in another post, I am still using 14, as the newer Ubuntus would just crash on the machine. It's perfectly adequate for what I use it for.

IMO, if you're going to use Linux to manage your music collection, the web app options are your best options, unless you really like mpd for some reason (which is valid because mpd is nice).

Funkwhale, Jellyfin, and the dozen Subsonic forks/clones are better than whatever desktop music managers exist, and they have cross-platform clients so you can access your collection on your FireTV or phone.

There's no real reason to run any of them on Linux, though, since they're just web apps. Jellyfin and some others are written in C# using .NET Core, so they'd probably be more stable on Windows, anyway.

I don't want a web app to play my local music collection. What I want is:

1. here's the directory with my music files in it

2. shuffle play it.

That's it. This is not rocket science. I appear to be a unique snowflake, or somebody on the WMP team is just like me. Because that just causes every other music player to commit seppuku.

VLC (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/) has always handled shuffling music without issue for me on Linux (and any other operating system). Have you tried VLC yet?

Also, there are other Linux media players that focus more specifically on music:

- Lollypop (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Lollypop): GTK-based

- Elisa (https://elisa.kde.org): Qt-based

- Vvave (https://vvave.kde.org): Qt-based, mobile-first

As I recall, it was VLC that would randomly crash and corrupt its index file. Maybe they fixed it since then, but I got tired of dealing with it. I just want to listen to my tunes while I work. I just can't believe that in 2022, all the streamers I bought except WMP are unable to do this.

mpg123 -C -Z *mp3 works for me.

You might like Quod Libet. It comes from the "spreadsheet" school of music library management.

This is sarcastic isnt it?

One criticism of Linux that I've never heard before is too few music players ;)

Whichever music player didn't work for you here, there are dozens of others that might.

> do a little light word processing

For the vast majority of people, “a little light word processing” involves Microsoft Word, which instantly rules out Linux for the near computer illiterate.

For the near computer illiterate, the tiny subset of Word they use can be easily replaced by Libre Office or Google Spreadsheets.

Except of course people send .doc/.docx around and expect .doc/.docx to be sent around. Ask the average person to do some word processing and send the result to you, the chance of receiving something else is close to zero.

Speaking from experience dealing with near computer illiterates, including my mom.

Of course you can argue that it’s easy to learn to export to .doc/.docx.

Or you can share your Google doc around and let them edit it without creating new files.

Problem with that is that either they have to have a Google account that they are willing to share with you or you have to make it so that anyone with the link can edit the doc, which is a big no no usually.

> Ask the average person to do some word processing and send the result to you, the chance of receiving something else is close to zero.

Sometimes even if you just ask for photo.

This is just not true. It’s a big change. LibreOffice has a lot of problems. It will never be anything close to Word.

It's my impression that for a near illiterate user, they won't be able to notice the differences unless they cannot open the document at all. Those differences crop up once you know enough Word features to notice the difference. Near illiterate users don't use almost any features of Word beyond the bare basics.

As an aside, before we moved entirely to Google docs in my job, I used LibreOffice to edit Word documents without major problems.

LibreOffice[1] handles light word processing pretty well. For more complex use cases involving Microsoft Office's "Office Open XML" formats, the proprietary but free-of-charge WPS Office for Linux[2] has great compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. It's available as a Flatpak[3] (which lets you turn off network access for the application if you don't trust it).[4]

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org

[2] https://www.wps.com/office/linux/

[3] https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.wps.Office

[4] https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal

ONLYOFFICE also has desktop editors, and good compatibility with docx while being open source.

https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/download-desktop.aspx

My mum and dad both had zero issues just replacing the whole office stack with libre.

I, kinda know both, and by far prefer libre mostly because it's UI doesn't change every other year.

It's always the random stuff like Bluetooth working haphazardly, webcam not having the right driver, USB-C not working with your 4K monitor, or some other cutting edge feature with a dealbreaking kernel bug that gets you.

I have an XPS 7390 with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (developer edition, so it shipped with Linux) that I'm afraid to upgrade to 20.04 because of a known Bluetooth issue that would prevent me from taking any zoom calls. And the Bluetooth already barely works as is.

I do all my zoom calls on Windows. Have you tried WSL lately? It's increasingly reduced the necessity for a dedicated Linux machine.

I have a Precision 7540 that came with 18.04. I wasn't too satisfied with the experience out of the box. However, after upgrading to 20.04, things have been nearly flawless. I installed the default 20.04 image without anything from Dell. You might try installing a more recent version of Ubuntu.

But how many people to multimedia desktop publishing or photoshop level editing of photos? I bet it's far less than the number of coders and people who just need a system for web browsing and light office suite usage and other "light" tasks. Linux is perfectly fine for those people. the only people I can think that aren't "almost there" are hardcore gamers and people who need professional software that only runs in windows or macos. Most things in business are in the cloud these days anyway.

Better not watch YouTube in the process though.

Getting hardware video decoding working is hit-and-miss to this day, even with forced flags, which naturally the computer illiterate don't have a clue.

> But God help you if you need to do multimedia desktop publishing or do Photoshop-level editing of photos or (in my case) do anything requiring a Common Access Card.

Common Access Card's are one of my favorite examples of regulatory capture. You can use them on any OS you want, as long as it's Window's. The software to use them on Linux is free to anyone with military credentials and has no good way to test it works except by logging onto a military website.

They now work nearly flawlessly on macOS (this did not used to be the case).

I tried it for a year on Linux. Really, I truly tried. I threw out my MacBook and bought a Dell, put Ubuntu on it, and tried to integrate it into a DoD corporate network environment.

It was hell. And it was LONELY hell.

Yeah my MIL had a 2012 Dell that my son uses at her house. It was running Windows 7, and took about 10 minutes to boot and the same to shut down.

I put Pop_OS on it. It has Firefox and Minecraft which are the only two things he cares about, and it runs so much more quickly. She wanted to throw it out but now it’s less junk in the pile.

It’s not ironic. It’s by design. Too many companies depend on closed-source ecosystems to siphon a profit from the average user, so they will never allow Linux to serve the masses while also allowing it to remain open and free.

To reverse this. Too many companies depend on open-source ecosystems to siphon a profit from the average dev by persuading them to work for free. Foss isn't free. It merely shifts the costs from users and corporations to that one guy in Nebraska.

Foss came about because RMS wanted to fix his printer, other academics wanted to share their code, devs didn't want to have to go through finance to buy software, and internet companies wanted to reduce their costs. The rest is just post hoc rationalization.

> perfect for two groups of people: the nearly computer illiterate, and coders

But what if their children all use FaceTime to communicate?

I think the illiterate place is already taken by Apple.

I think the illiterate place is already taken by Apple

Except that most software developers at FAANG and other large companies almost always use MacBooks.

You are reversing the argument.

Isn't the "computer illiterate" the majority of people. Those other activities are working professionals in relatively niche fields.

Windows is for the people that knowingly pay to build their own digital prison with ads, where they will be beaten up by other prisoners.

No, it’s for the average computer user who uses it because megacorps like Microsoft and Adobe need to siphon a profit somehow. People don’t choose to use Windows. It’s a decision made by many of the same industry titans who have increasing influence on the direction of Linux as well. But Linux will never serve the masses because Microsoft and Adobe won’t allow it.

Linux already serves the masses pretty well.

I've found this to be true too. And unfortunately, those "in-between" users make up 99% of all users.

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