Affinity Designer is the only reason I have a Windows VM. I really wish I could get it fully working on WINE - I have it installed but it can’t save files.
I wouldn’t compare it to Krita - it’s more like Illustrator (or perhaps Inkscape if looking for a FOSS equivalent, although it isn’t quite up to par in terms of features or workflow).
No problem! I really wish Serif/Affinity would port their suite of apps to Linux. Although it’s proprietary software, their underdog status vs. Adobe would still be a good fit in the ecosystem, I think.
I’m glad it worked out for you. In my case they are really not comparable, especially when working with text. Inkscape can’t even do bullet points or paragraph spacing.
Not OP, but my personal (mild) meh with Libre is it’s visual style. But to be fair, I use it rarely and for those few occasions I’ve been too lazy to check if there are design alternatives (which most definitely exist, we’re on Linux after all).
Even the tabbed view was hard to use for me, especially the impossible to use “styles” box that scrolls a narrow view. I use it all the time on MS Word, and much prefer how they handle it.
Also, no CSD, so the title bar kinda just chills there, meanwhile it’s used in Microsoft Word.
I don’t support Linux fanatics who insist that Linux is for everyone and anyone. It is vastly different (IMO in a good way) than your typical Windows OS but once you spend some time figuring it out, following “cumbersome” installation instructions might take no more than 5 minutes.
This article is on the other side of the spectrum. Presenting the Linux desktop as a “collective delusion” is, at least, disrespect to all the people who struggle to make it real.
I know people who switched to Linux as their main OS and claim to be more productive than they were on Windows because they can adapt the desktop experience to their workflow and there are no unnecessary distractions like popups and ads that Microsoft likes to overuse in their latest OS versions.
LibreOffice is just good enough for most paperwork with good MS-Office compatibility (neither I nor anybody I know ever had a single problem in years).
Of course there are drawbacks, but most of what the article mentions are purely over-generalisations, distribution-specific quirks or “I can’t be bothered to spend 5 minutes to learn something new” type of arguments. In Linux, the time you spend learning something new is a good investment.
Finally, I myself am a computer geek who likes to meddle in programming. For me, using anything else than a *nix-based POSIX-compatible system (except, perhaps, for Haiku) would be a nightmare.
Linux is not a religion. It’s a tool, and you should always pick a tool based on whether it can perform the needed tasks and whether you are comfortable with it, without fanaticism. And Linux is objectively better than Windows in some respects, and vice versa. So, if I were to follow the author’s logic, the Windows desktop would be as much a collective delusion in my eyes.
LibreOffice is just good enough for most paperwork with good MS-Office compatibility (neither I nor anybody I know ever had a single problem in years).
Are you sure, it can’t even handle simple typing and bullet points consistently…
OnlyOffice is indeed a good choice for the best MS compatibility. Also Google Docs is amazing for collaboration in teams (yes, I know it’s not FOSS, but hey, it works). NextCloud is nice but it doesn’t offer collaborative editing of Office documents AFAIK.
For presentations I have been lately preferring Inkscape. It has multi-page support since some versions ago and can export to PDF, clickable links and everything. I don’t use animations or anything too fancy in my presentation and I like the flexibility that a vector editor can offer me, so Inkscape works well for my case.
Linux has found its niche on the server side and among tech enthusiasts and counter-culture types, and that’s okay! I, for one, like it that way. Having Linux at home is a nice change from using Windows at work all day, but I might not feel the same way if I used Linux at work.
I don’t consider myself a Linux fanatic by any means, but I do think that something like Linux Mint is viable for pretty much anyone as their home desktop OS, in the much the same way that Android is viable for anyone as their mobile OS. As others have said, the main thing where Linux needs to improve for home users is game support, and that has already come a long, long way. If all my games worked perfectly on Linux, I would ditch Windows at home altogether. Fortunately, Steam is pushing for more Linux support.
I did, last time two months ago. Unfortunately their presentation software is pretty minimal at the moment, and I prefer the fully open ODP standard. Anyways, at the time there was an issue with videos that weren’t playing at all.
I think you are understating the value of the Arch Wiki and AUR.
I am also a university student. I was required by one of my courses to program an Arduino using ArduinoIDE. My program, however, was not detecting my Arduino. By simply scrolling the Arch wiki, I found the issue, downloaded the fix via AUR and was able to get it working hassle-free. An equivalent of this process does not exist on NixOS.
I do not know what programs your uni requires, but if you do plan on using them on Linux, Debian or Arch, or their many derivatives should be the go-to simply for documentation and quick-fixes alone.
I really like these suggestions, I’ve always wanted to contribute to FOSS software, but always felt underskilled. I will add this to my list of things to do to challenge my Linux and basic programming skills.
It’s worth noting that the barrier to entry as a maintainer depends on which distro you’re using at the time. It’s not uncommon for a distro to have a community repository system, like PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR for Arch, MPR for Debian, etc. I’m not very familiar with Mint, and couldn’t easily tell if it has its own or just uses PPAs from upstream.
It isn’t especially taxing on programming skills, and if you don’t pick too complex of a package, the Linux skills required shouldn’t be wildly above your level, but may push you to learn some new things by digging a bit deeper. I haven’t formally maintained public packages, but I’ve needed to build a few over my years using Linux, and it was easier than I’d expected to just build one. It may be easier than you think, too.
Thanks for the additional info. I installed Arch, it was far less daunting then I anticipated. In fact, it was prettt straightforward. I’ll look into your suggestion.
I was experimenting with the Cadence tools from KXStudio. These are mostly made for JACK, but PipeWire has a JACK interface so it should work. It’s similar to helvum, but with more options.
Not sure right now which one (maybe Carla), but one of these programs also support adding sound effect nodes that have their own GUI! You probably want to use it in multi-client or patchbay mode
My audio set up is using jack on Ubuntu. If I were to start using pipewire, does it replace jack? Or do you use it alongside jack? I use mostly ardour, hydrogen, renoise and bitwig.
qjackctl will actually connect to pipewire, I use its graph window a lot to route audio when the default volume control isn’t enough. But yeah it does (or can) replace jackd.
One distro that I’ve recently found runs pretty well on older/slower systems like this is wattOS. It’s a distro focused on power efficiency, but because of that it does well on underpowered systems.
I’m a software developer (my background), I was always kind of interested in it, but primarily the fact that Apple stopped giving my 2015 MacBook Pro OS updates, including security updates, which forced me to do something.
And yeah, Plasma or GNOME is pretty much how the OS looks like.
I’ve been running Nobara on my Surface Pro 4, which is based on Fedora. It comes with all the surface drivers built in, which really helps. It’s been working pretty well for me.
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