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Comment by resource_waste | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a phenomena I observe in the FOSS community where we reflexively respond to suggestions despite them being far beneath their FOSS alternatives. Only after digging or running into issues, do you find the good stuff.

Brand name -> Low quality, highly mentioned -> High quality, rarely mentioned

Photoshop-> GIMP -> Krita

Windows -> Debian-family/Ubuntu/Mint -> Fedora

I almost feel like a religious Zealot when I teach people that Krita>>>GIMP, Fedora>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Debian-family. Its unpaid work, its moral work. People shouldn't have to suffer with low quality products because something was popular a few years ago.

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David Revoy doesn't recommend Fedora 40 for digital artists any more. The main reasons are regressions in tablet software with Plasma 6, and Krita not being a Wayland app.

[1] https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-...

Yeah, sadly tablet support is one of the areas where wayland has been particularly slow in terms of getting its act together (it's explicitly disabled in krita because of this, which I think is a combo of standards not existing, compositor support, and Qt support). It's definitely the main reason I'm still on Xorg.

Which is hilarious when you realize that wayland started as an automotive infotainment project.

> automotive infotainment project

I haven't heard that story before. Got any references?

He added an edit that the tablet software in Plasma 6 still works as it did before when run in X11. Only if you switch to Wayland, or your distro does it for you by removing X11 packages, will you get the (for the time being) less capable version.

You are right, your theory works but it looks like you never tried OpenSUSE. It’s basically Fedora but with great administration tools, a better package manager (but it also uses rpm packages) and with optional AUR-like community packages.

OpenSUSE >>> Fedora >>>> Debian Family

I wonder if there OpenSUSE distros for the RPi or if I’m best sticking to Raspbian due to the hardware quirks.

https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Raspberry_Pi4

It exists !

Fedora and Debian (stable) are not really directly comparable, they have different goals. Fedora is essentially a beta channel for RedHat, equivalent to Debian Unstable/testing. Fedora will ship a more up-to-date desktop, but Debian will be better for servers and/or users who don't need the latest Gnome.

> Fedora will ship a more up-to-date desktop, but Debian will be better for servers

This is the problem, people are recommending Debian-family for desktop.

I don't think people are really talking about server linux, that is almost a solved problem.

Last time I wanted to try Fedora, it didn't ship some packages I wanted to use that Debian sid shipped, and Debian sid is similarly up-to-date in many stuff (they don't ship plasma 6 yet though, even in sid).

I think Debian sid is underappreciated as a decent rolling release distro. I get that Debian doesn't advertise it that way, but it virtually never breaks for me.

I used fedora 24 for a few years in the mid-late 2010s. Now I've been using Ubuntu for the past 4 years and I don't see too much difference in my daily use.

I mostly use it for development - backends and data/spark mostly, nothing lower level. What does fedora do better? Is it something that was introduced in later releases?

Ubuntu tends to push their proprietary snap format, even replacing some dpkgs with secret snap shims.

Fedora will usually push major Linux changes before other distros; systemd, wayland, cgroupsv2, btrfs, etc.

I wish I'd knew of Krita sooner. Genuinely one of the main drivers of my switch to Mac OS was Affinity Photo (which is excellent btw), because I was driven half insane by GIMP's frustrating keyboard controls. Need it be that difficult to unselect something?

> Need it be that difficult to unselect something?

What's difficult about Ctrl-Shift-A? If it's a problem for you, it's easy to change the keyboard shortcut. You can also just click away. GIMP certainly makes some things unexpectedly challenging, but that seems like a strange example to pick.

There is a lot of overlap, but I’d hardly call GIMP low quality.

I use Gimp for photos (layers and such) . It wasn’t intuitive but I know how to use it now: I have Krita on an android tablet with a stylus for painting (it’s brushes are amazing) and frankly it’s pretty fun to use.

Using open source can be “free” but if you use something a lot they alway need donations.

Compared to Krita's interface, abstractions, and capability, GIMP feels pretty archaic. It's a vaguely capable photo editor but it's awful for digital painting.

Well that might be because, well, GIMP is made for photo editing, not for digital painting. Of course, GIMP does have some drawing tools in it, but that's clearly not the task it was designed for.

Fedora >> Debian is an interesting take. I've never particularly got along with rpm-based distros, and they always seemed much the same quality, just different. What makes the difference in your opinion?

Copypasted:

"Faster, feature rich, less bugs, things just work.

Debian-family will have you running into hardware issues, peripheral issues, software conflicts, and using the terminal to update/install things.

I used to think Linux was cheap/knockoff Windows.... No, that was just Debian-family. Fedora is better than Windows."

Krita > GIMP, absolutely, but unfortunately both of them are centuries behind any proprietary software despite only being decades old. And I'm not even talking about PAID proprietary software. Free apps are also better.

A frequent issue with FOSS is that they can handle a variety of edge cases because some technical person needed it once and went through the trouble of implementing it, but they offer a subpar experience at basic cases.

They'll add a feature because it was in the bug tracker and then say "it's done," and you need to hold a committee for 6 months in the forum to change anything in it. Meanwhile a proprietary app made by 1 person will gain 30 different niceties to the basic feature in 1 week.

It's just very hard to imagine how an application that existed for 20 years can't select multiple layers at once or reorder its brushes. It almost feels like abandonware at this point, despite them getting new features from time to time.

Which proprietary free app is better than Krita?

Depending on your use case, fire alpaca, azpainter, graphics gale.

The problem is that Krita/GIMP have many features that very few people use. Like you have digital artists who don't need CMYK, but the entire application needs to support it. Or you have people who want to write text on images. Or people that want to do photo manipulation. Or people who need to make assets for games. Or even doing something weird like saving a PNG without pre-multiplied alpha.

So whenever you compare it with something else, you're able to point out to all these features they accumulated through the years.

But if you started making an app today for a specific use case, in 1 month you would be able to add features that these applications have lacked for decades, and these will be just the first features you'll be able to think of.

So it's always this strange feeling where an application clearly has had a lot of work put into it and yet seems to lack something extremely basic you would expect to find in an application that has had a lot of work put into it.

Wait, can you explain Fedora>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Debian? Should I be looking at switching?

I lost confidence in Fedora when they made the incredibly weird decision to disable swap by default based on the flawed argument that memory compression could replace it

How is Fedora better than Debian? (genuinely curious)

It's not, it's just different. You mostly get newer stuff and more breakage.

So it's like Debian Unstable?

A bit, but it feels a lot more alien. If you're moving through the Debian/Ubuntu family, the base system is quite similar, apt is always there for you etc... . In Fedora, it's different.

> more breakage.

NO! STOP!

Seriously, don't spread rumors. Debian "Stable" has bugs and issues that up-to-date distros have solved.

The word "Stable" has 0 correlation with bug-free. It is entirely meaning "outdated/old" and used for bug consistency, not OS stability.

The main one for me is not pushing snaps and other weird canonical ideas.

Canonical is Ubuntu not Debian.

Faster, feature rich, less bugs, things just work.

Debian-family will have you running into hardware issues, peripheral issues, software conflicts, and using the terminal to update/install things.

I used to think Linux was cheap/knockoff Windows.... No, that was just Debian-family. Fedora is better than Windows.

As somebody who has the family using debian for decades now, I am very averse to trying out a new daily driver. Of course if it really is better and not just a different way of going about things, it is worth a try. But this comment gives me no real information, just an opinionated take without pointing to anything specific other than I might need to use apt, which I like. The hardware, software, peripheral comments seem odd or at least about seven years out of date, since I rarely have trouble with any of that and many vendors focus on publishing Debian compatible drivers / software as their only Linux contrib, so they actually get things before other distros in many instances.

You are probably the worst person to ask about this topic because you are used to a poorly performing distro. You already learned all the terminal commands to fix things. You already know all the stuff you need to upgrade.

Most people havent been using linux for decades, and Fedora takes care of things you 'deal with'.

> The hardware, software, peripheral comments seem odd or at least about seven years out of date,

Sorry dude, this is just wrong. You literally could not run Nvidia GPUs on Debian last year due to Kernel 5. Your ignorance doesnt make this problem go away. Any new laptop + debian is a disaster.

"Don't use Nvidia, don't use laptops, learn the terminal, its not that hard to upgrade X, its not that hard to install Y, its not that hard to change Z setting"- Debianer

Why do you think Photoshop is low quality? In my mind Photoshop is very high quality. It just costs money and isn't open source.

In their example Photoshop was "brand name", while Gimp was "low quality" and Krita was "high quality".

I see that now. For some reason I read the first arrow as the arrow of implication.

Photoshop is also low quality, in its own special ways, but it's a different topic.

They were saying the Photoshop is the brand name and gimp is it’s low quality replacement.

You have converted me.

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