I started using Linux many moons ago when the LAMP stack was common for web development. (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP). But that was only on servers. It’s only in the last couple of years I’ve switched to seriously using Linux on the Desktop. I finally got fed up of Microsoft writing software as if using their OS meant they owned my machine and they could do what they liked with it. So I’ve switched. While windows still sits on a partition due to a couple of games, I find I’m going months without needing to touch it. I suspect I’ll be rid of windows entirely in the near future.
The Uni Eng department ran a SunOS email server for students and a SunOS lab for our coding projects. We were taught UNIX in the intro engineering class.
A couple of my friends in the dorm fired up Linux servers (early Debian and RedHat systems), bought domains (3 character .coms!) and setup email servers for our friend groups. It also was a lot faster to do our C/C++ dev there because it wasn’t an overloaded machine.
Within a couple of years I had two systems, one Win98 and the other RedHat. From there it has been a winding tale of Linux distros, a stint of OpenBSD fun until SMP boards became common, the occasional Windows machine (back when I gamed more, but after Tribes 2 on Linux), and a short work-related dalliance with OSX (10.1-10.4). For the last decade it’s been almost 100% Linux anymore. If there’s a tool you need on a given OS, use what you need to, but if it runs on Linux I wouldn’t use anything else. I’ve got a pile of machines for work and home, including servers (Debian), laptops/desktops (Mint), and SoC boards (Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, etc).
There’s just too much control and not a bunch of company-driven shit (See: Ads in your start menu? WTF kind of dystopian universe are you accepting?) with Linux distros.
Back when, after the world didn’t end after Y2K got patched and saved it, I was getting tired of Windows and none of my Macs were up-to-date enough to handle my writing workload, I gave Caldera OpenLinux a shot. Ended up compiling everything myself and used that for two years. Had a copy of MetaFrame laying around from a completed project, so I installed it on Windows 2000, and served Office apps over the network so I could use Word in Linux. I’ve had something running Linux since.
I’ve been daily driving Debian with cinnamon on top. The only thing keeping my windows partition going is lack of HDR support and horrific Wayland nvidia support.
I’m a pragmatic programmer. I came to Linux because we were doing server-side stuff, I stayed because bash shell is a blunt tool but command line is incoherent
I always shoot in raw+jpeg with the jpeg quality set to 100%. The raw files have a higher dynamic range and there is little or no processing done to them. The files are large, but storage space is cheap these days. The jpeg files are for convenience and if I don’t like the way they come out, I can process the raw file however I want and export it to whatever format is most suitable for what I’m using it for.
This is what I use for switching: pastebin.com/J5VT03eq
It uses pactl (should work with both Pulse and pipewire-pulse) and KDialog to list available sinks.
It was a friend who helped me install ubuntu 8 on my PC in dualboot when I was like 14/15 years old. Was already a computer nerd, though my friend was way more into everything Linux related. I got hooked there, though at that time it was a real pain in the ass to use wifi in ubuntu. I wouldn’t call me obsessed, but I really don’t like using Windows. I have to for work and I despise it.
Zorin OS for now. Old kernel and stuff, but it’s stable, and I like the looks more than I did PopOS!. Maybe PopOS! is cooler now with their Cosmic thingy.
Jpg at 70% will lose a significant amount of detail. It is a “lossy” format, you cant judt compress data for nothing.
AVIF is significantly more efficient than jpeg, so it loses less image data for higher compression (smaller file sizes).
JXL supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is supposed to be more efficient yet over AVIF. However it’s got proprietary all over it because Google et al. For thst alone I would shy away from JXL and go AVIF.
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