My love for Linux remains unrequited because my work in video and photography ties me to Adobe. I’ve dabbled with dual-booting, and though Linux’s allure is undeniable, the inconvenience of constantly switching between operating systems is unbearable. The idea of mastering DaVinci Resolve and an alternative photo editor has crossed my mind, but deadlines loom, and time to learn new software is scarce. The anxiety of not knowing if I can accomplish my tasks with unfamiliar programs is overwhelming. Ironically, my disdain for Adobe rivals my contempt for Musk and Trump, making it all the more disheartening to feel ensnared by Adobe’s ecosystem when tantalising alternatives are just out of reach.
I've beeb gaming in HDR for years, that is definitely a deal breaker for me. Shocked honestly that with OLED monitors blowing up, linux still doesn't support HDR?
Steam deck is the only linux device that does AFAIK, via their in-house compositor Gamescope.
It's on GitHub, but I have a feeling some of the HDR specfics that would be needed for an open source linux implementation could be at the ransom of some standards body, like 4K 120fps support on AMD graphics cards under Linux
The problem with HDR is that it’s very difficult to get working on X11, to the point that those who tried (NVIDIA, 8 years ago) gave up long time ago and moved on. X11/Xorg is legacy solution that is still there mostly because it always was and things still depend on it.
Wayland can get HDR and it gradually does, but it wasn’t priority for quite a long time as there was much more basic stuff missing, to the point many users wouldn’t switch until recently, and because X was still the preferred display system for most users for such a long time, it wasn’t priority to fill missing gaps on Wayland side and it wasn’t moving forward too fast.
Now that things are coming together, over half of the user base (probably) already switched to Wayland, there are more desktop/WM options on the Wayland side, with fewer showstoppers every year, finally NVIDIA drivers start working on Wayland, color management is also getting closer to be part of the official spec. It’s already possible to play games in HDR, but with some solvable caveats: if a game runs on X11 (which for Wine/Proton the Wayland driver is still experimental) they use swap-chain hack to that’s only available in the gamescope compositor, so either in full blown Steak Deck session or wrapped in nested gamescope instance. This will be more out-of-box when:
the stable color management protocol is actually in place, more compositors implement it (currently only gamescope and kwin_wayland have HDR)
winewayland.drv stabilizes and implements HDR
Wine and Proton run on Wayland natively by default
Yeah maybe like in 1995... If you're having this kind of issue in the present day, you'd have to be shooting yourself in the foot very very intentionally. (An example is a broken custom Arch or Gentoo setup, which you shouldn't be using anyway unless you know exactly what you're doing.)
I've been regularly trying whatever Linux distro is supposed to be good on and off every other year, and there was always something that made me go 'that should be working right out the box' and then spend too much time fixing it.
If you're not able to connect to a NAS for some reason, that's almost definitely on you or your friend in this case. But even that aside, expecting a one to one transition has always felt odd to me... You don't switch from an Android device to an iOS device or vice versa with the expectation of everything working one to one. You usually understand that there's a lot of differences involved.
There's ofc things like VR that I will admit Linux is quite far behind in, but for general use, Linux is problem-free for the most part these days. And you definitely don't end up having an unbootable system pretty much ever unless you intentionally fuck it up. Like yeah, Linux lets me uninstall the kernel or bootloader if i choose to do that (it will try to warn me ofc) and that would render the system unbootable. But that would be me being irredeemably stupid, not the operating system's fault. Hell, some distros like Tumbleweed even come with a better snapshotting setup than both Windows and macOS, making it pretty much impossible to fuck it up that badly.
this is the other thing linux communities are well-known for: blaming the user for not being good enough.
i think the last time my linux failed to boot there was a power outage...but the machine was a laptop. before that it was running an update (fedora/nobara). before that it was installing void ("installation complete" -> reboot ->grub recovery). before that it was running an update (pop_os). Before that it was running an update (manjaro, this was during a brief moment when it was very popular and linux folks claimed it was user friendly and suitable for moderate users). I've managed to recover from most of those cases listed above, but with the exception of manjaro that was 2023+2024 right there.
I said your friend is an idiot, not you. And even in his case, i only really blamed him for literally intentionally messing shit up. Should I remind you that you're the one who said that story? Congrats on winning your argument against a strawman i guess?
The second paragraph of your answer just tells me you have never had an idea of what you're doing. And that would be totally fine if you didn't blame it on Linux as a whole, btw. But you do just that.
Why would you use everything except the most obvious distro choices? Manjaro is literally famous for terrible practices, always has been. 5 minutes of research would tell you that much. You try nobara but not vanilla fedora?? You try pop_os but not Linux Mint? You try Void for some reason?? Fkin Void? You're clearly not really ready to tinker and you want stuff to just work, so just go with something obviously and famously stable and out of the box like Linux Mint. It's really that simple... You complicate shit for yourself and then complain about how you've had terrible experiences. Ofc you've had them because you never really bothered to try and keep it simple for yourself.
I always choose the practical solution over anything else. And there are real problems in Linux right now, like fractional scaling on GNOME, VR, HDR being hit or miss, anticheat not working, etc. So i don't force anybody onto Linux. But pretending we're still in 1995 is just malicious coming from you.
If you're just lost about shit, people in the Linux community are generally ready to help. Hell, if you describe your use cases well, literally everybody would help you as much as they can. But coming on here and using a wild (and probably fake) story to flame something for no real reason and then expecting a positive response is kind of weird, don't you think?
Edit: sorry, wrong user i guess. You all haters kind of blend in and look the same lol.
I won't bother responding to your hate fueled rage post except to say those are all highly recommended distros, except Manjaro which I've already stated was hot at the time. Void for example is the no-contest top rated distro right now. When the "best" Linux has to offer won't get past grub from their install wizard, that's not an incompetence issue.
Look man, irrespective of who i originally intended to reply to, you responded to me by saying I was simply blaming the user. Which clearly wasn't the case. If you think his initial anecdote at all is realistic, then you haven't really used any well established distro in a while. Accessing an SMB share especially is very very straightforward right now if nothing else.
Void is a distro that doesn't use systemd. That alone would put it out of the contest, let alone being the top-rated distro... It's fine to not understand why that is, but again, you could have just asked on any community. Again man, stop complicating stuff for yourself... And I never said you're incompetent, you're probably really good at this stuff, I feel like you just haven't taken the time to read through and understand. And again, even that would be fine, just don't blame Linux in its entirety. Linux is too broad to be blamed in its entirety.
If you go by hype alone, NixOS is probably the most popular distro right now, doesn't mean I'm going to recommend it to you.
Use an actually well-established distribution like Fedora, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu or Linux mint. Use Plasma if you can. Use Flatpaks for packages where possible and use the native repository otherwise. It's pretty much that easy these days. I even use the Steam flatpak for gaming nowadays. Grass is pretty green over here now, and I'm saying that as someone who does still use Windows. I use Windows both at work and for certain games. So it's not like I'm out of touch either.
Sorry if that post felt rage fueled by the way, didn't mean it that way and wasn't in rage either. I'm just bad with conveying stuff, especially with English not being my first language :)
My Nas is a standard truenas scale installation with standard SMB shares that all my windows computers pick up instantly without any or extremely limited fiddling.
I'm not some nooblet that doesn't know shit, tyvm. I've been using computers for decades.
I don't expect a one to one translation between using windows and Linux, but I do expect basic functionalities to be, well, functional out if the box.
But does it have the easy dual boot setup flow of Ubuntu? With that you tick the option in setup and it basically does everything for you, just asks about disk allocation
That's not a feature of Ubuntu, more so the installer itself. I'm sure many distros, especially Ubuntu-based one will ship with the exact same installer. Idk if mint uses the same installer, but it would really surprise me that the option isn't available.
Thankfully it's pretty easy to confirm by yourself. Grab a USB key, flash the ISO and have a look at it!
I am wondering how many people give up because their exact program isn't on there.
I get having to use Adobe software if you are an industry professional, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who don't want to change because qbittorrent is not the same as utorrent. Or peazip is different than 7zip.
I'm somewhat of a creator myself and I mostly use creative software that has Linux versions (will move to Linux once Win 10's support expires and/or I somehow get enough money for a new PC), and they're legit better than Adobe software for my usecase. Photoshop is nearly unusable for digital painting (it's more of a photo-editing software with some drawing capabilities), Krita is pretty good, and my only pet peewee was that some of the brush compositing modes had confusing names and were hidden deep inside the menu, but then I found "greater", which can somewhat mimic the behavior of the default CSP brushes.
Also can someone recommend me a guitar amp modeller (preferably an open-source one), that is available on Linux, so I won't suffer from both the demo of Guitar Rig came with my Arturia Minifuse, or with trying to get one running in Wine with all their complicated copy protection schemes?
Both qbittorrent and 7zip are FOSS projects that are perfectly available on Linux. There's actually very few software packages that aren't also on Linux, but they have a strong pull. Like AutoCad, Photoshop, video editors, DAWs, etc. Is specialized niche software, not everyday software that usually stop people. Also, they are unfamiliar with a workflow to do certain things on Linux's DEs.
I'm probably an outlier lol, I installed the Windows version of 7zip (via wine) alongside the native Linux version just to have a GUI for setting the compression parameters if I'm creating a new archive from the file manager
The biggest problem with Linux (other than the whole "most people give up the second they see a terminal" thing) is software availability, which will hopefully improve as Linux gains market share.
I'm not watching movies in Linux, I don't really care about HDR, but I've had nothing but horrible experiences out of video editing products in Linux. If it's not a skin for FFmpeg, My project has about a 10% chance of making it through to usable output.
I used the limited HDR capabilities of my monitor (VA panel with no backlight zones I can spot) in some games, it's somewhat better than in normal mode, otherwise I just use SDR to save power.
As a user of FreeCAD and someone who made a living using CAD software, FreeCAD ain't it for the 'real world' yet. But I do have hopes that someday it might be.
I wholeheartedly agree with this tbh. Love FreeCAD for my 3D printing stuff, pretty much use it daily, however compared to something like Solidworks or AutoCAD it would be torture IMO to willingly chose FreeCAD for a complex real world product.
The biggest roadblock for FreeCAD right now is that is isn't that forgiving, you often have to go into a "technical" way of thinking to work around its quirks. The reality is, designers want to design, not become technical experts at navigating FreeCAD.
Even something like creating a thread shouldn't be as involved as FreeCAD makes it - once you get used to it it's OK, but in other CAD solutions it's often as simple as clicking a hole and choosing a thread creation tool...
Well, threads are actually quite easy to create in FreeCAD these days. Unless you need some kind of specialty thread, like say a light bulb thread or British ME, (Model Engineer), thread.
The Hole tool is merely point and select the thread you want - your choice of modeled or not. Plus you can do countersinks and counterbores from the same tool. The Thread Profile workbench makes external and internal threads fast and easy. Make your choice of thread - vee, buttress, or ACME/Trapazoidal and three clicks later you got a thread. The Fasteners workbench will also let you create threads easily too. Gears and springs have become simple to make with no real modeling required anymore. I've been trying out the Sheet metal workbench lately also. Not very full featured yet, but it does the basics pretty well so far. So lots of quality of life improvements have been making their way into FreeCAD since 0.17.
Where FreeCAD fails, (beside the TPN issue), is in the somewhat slower basic work flow. But, with customization, it can get pretty close to being fairly fast. But most users are casual users and don't dig into settings very much. But the biggest issue is the lack of a decent single robust and integrated Assembly workbench. I can design parts all day long, but unless I can easily put them all together to see if and how they all work together, it makes FreeCAD a no-go for commercial work. I can't even really design a model steam engine and assemble all the parts very easily.
Now, Ondsell is working on a unifying assembly workbench that I have very high hopes for, but it's not there yet. They do have a ways to go still.
Maybe? normally I set the screen to a low brightness level to reduce burn-in, OLED screens still look plenty bright at levels where LCD screens would straight-up be unreadable. I might need to get used to HDR though...
I'm currently using Plasma Wayland on Arch with the 1080p monitor built into my laptop and an external 4K monitor right next to it at 175%, and it works flawlessly. When a window is half on one monitor and half on the other it actually looks how it's supposed to. I can drag a window back and forth between the monitors and watch it rescale itself to run at that monitor's native resolution. Some apps, you don't even see the transition. The current scale is passed through to the applications, so text looks nice and sharp.
Plasma 6.1 will release soon with some further improvements. But Plasma 6 with Wayland basically solved all my issues already. My setup is fractional scaling with "Apply scaling themselves" for Legacy Applications (X11) and Adaptive sync set to Automatic. Works better than my Windows setup so far
Fractional Scaling on Plasma's Wayland session specifically is good now. GNOME on Wayland forces blurry scaling on every Xwayland app with no way to opt out.
My personal grievances are using a laptop with ubuntu. No wireless casting of display to tv, no good smart phone as a mouse/keyboard control, the screen is sometimes sideways for no reason.
But Linux and stuff is interesting still. I'm just not ready for it as a daily driver.
KDE connecting infuriates the hell out of me. It's so close to being good. The features aren't at parity between the different platforms. It is absolutely awful at finding and pairing your phone. I have three different networks I connect to on a regular basis. I don't want to run static IPs on every network nor do all the clients support static IP. If you do use static IPs you better only need that one because it can't choose from a list. Wanted to scan a different subnet than you're on for your mobile device tough luck. I want to use it, I have it installed. I've said it IGMP hints. It's just not written well.
All that said, if you have an ISP bog standard router and one network that plays nice with it, it definitely works as a keyboard and mouse remote...
