What do you mean keep a spare machine for emergencies? Some of us have always had them as primaries, rather than leaving that world.

20 years ago, the type of person analogous to a typical HN type would have been on Linux. Thread after thread on places like Slashdot started from a position of Linux advocacy as a common baseline. Then in the early 2000s there was a massive shift to Mac among those types.

Personally, I miss the days of rank and file in such communities being desktop Linux advocates. We lost something of our soul.

I, for one, don't miss it. Linux Desktop evangelists are horrifically annoying people to deal with because they look down on everyone, believing themselves superior for using it. Tell them Linux doesn't work for what you're doing and they'll say you should change what you're doing, tell them it is missing essential functionality for you and they'll insist you don't need it, tell them you don't like the way parts of the system work and they'll list a dozen reasons you're wrong. Then, after roundly dismissing all criticism, they'll gaze into the heavens and shout "why won't more people use the Linux Desktop? Is it not pretty enough!?". In short, they're condescending assholes and I'm glad they aren't nearly as prevalent as they used to be.

I think your comment itself is a little presumptuous of motives and commits some of what you accuse others of doing.

But that aside. The free unix-like desktop has a lot of choices to be made, and one person's setup isn't going to be the same as another's. To me, that is the opposite of looking down on somebody for what they use, if we all agree that these are legitimate choices. And there is a little bit of a spirit that if something is lacking, you can try to pave your own way, which I don't see as a bad thing, though I can see others rejecting it.

If anything I think the current community is a little too homogeneous, with a lot of people opting for stock Ubuntu or whatever, than it used to be, and that's a criticism I would make.

I don't have a problem with people who use Linux Desktop, they have their reasons for their choices just as I do, many of which I would agree with[0]. My problem is with evangelists, people seeking to convert others to their chosen religion of Linux Desktop. Unfortunately because Linux Desktop users have a lot of overlap with Linux Desktop developers these attitudes still pervade the community. Case in point, how often do you hear a variation on the phrase "normal users don't need that"?

[0] and in fact I have a higher quantity of my devices running a Linux Desktop than I do Windows, but my main rig is Windows and that's unlikely to change for many reasons.

> Linux Desktop evangelists are horrifically annoying people to deal with

Agreed, and I am a Linux user. I would much rather spend my time with people who are interested in using Linux rather than promoting it. The discussions are much more meaningful. Besides, evangelists from one side tends to attract evangelists from the other side (with each side being as bad as the other). Once that happens, annoying advocacy tends to transform into belittling bickering.

It's ironic, Linux today is in a better state than its ever been. Chrome is Chrome, dependency hell is more easily mitigated by containerization, desktop environments have mostly become stable, hardware from Purism, System76, and Dell is quite good.

I think a lot of us just end up with Macs because work IT hates the idea of managing Linux machines and macOS gets you 95% of what you need.

> I think a lot of us just end up with Macs because work IT hates the idea of managing Linux machines

Many of us end up with Linux precisely because work IT doesn't manage Linux machines. (What's worse is when they think they can manage Linux machines.)

Everything you say is true, but I also remember every time slashdot would publish browser usage percentages it was something like 70% IE. visible perception did not match reality, even then.

How much of that was people accessing the site from their workplace? IE was mandatory in many places back then.

It seems that GP forgot to include the sarcasm flag.

Linux machines are fantastic if you don't need to use commercial software for things like graphics, as many web-focused developers do.

I do graphics, but on the scientific side, we all use Linux. Except when the lab provides us Macs, then we get frustrated and just remote in.

I'm just trying to detangle the type of graphics being mentioned. I do wish Nvidia drivers were better, but maybe that'll happen with ROCs coming out soon.

> I do wish Nvidia drivers were better

Get AMD. Why do people insist on getting Nvidia cards and then complain that those aren't aimed at them? Get the one that is selling to you.

Cannot reply to sibling... Nvidia doesn't have simply the best OpenGL implementation, it has the fastest and most forgiving implementation. No argument about speed (or Cuda), but by being forgiving of code that shouldn't work according to spec, it creates lock-in and makes more conformant implementations look bad.

Also, on Linux, AMD's OpenGL implementation - which is just Mesa - is very high quality.

> but by being forgiving of code that shouldn't work according to spec

So they are not following spec, and that's a good thing?

If you're trying to run a non-conformat application that you are unable or unwilling to modify, then yes. It is a good thing.

Because you simply can't do much ML experimentation on AMD; it lacks the entire CUDA ecosystem. I'm sorely tempted to run two GPUs, but also worried they'll probably clash.

I am interested to see ROCm. AMD has the contact for the exascale machines and there's a big push for ML at the DOE. So I hope there's some real competition coming (looks like it's already integrated into pytorch btw)

Because Nvidia has faster hardware (assuming you want that) and the best and most complete OpenGL implementation.

At least that is the reason i get Nvidia GPUs.

Except Nvidia is selling to me. I use cuda. At the end of the day a higher performing GPU is (MUCH) more important than running displays. There's lots of legacy code using cuda as well, so there's some lock in (AMD is tackling this issue but that's to be seen. We also use data parallel primitives - good for portability between super computers and things with different architectures - for many things but not everything, so when ROCm comes around this may not be an issue at all). But as of right now I'm locked in, at least with my priorities.

So please just stop telling us to get AMDs. That trades a small issue for a bigger one. Nvidia is selling is 90% of what we want and we're annoyed that they just don't care about that other 10%.

Because until recently, on Linux AMD's driver story hasn't been good and performance has lagged. The driver situation is improving but it will take time to win people back. It also doesn't help that they don't (yet) have a Ryzen-like story on GPUs.

Does the new driver architecture support controlling fan speed yet? I've been on both team green and team red, and not being a purist I have just used their proprietary drivers. It wasn't until AMD shifted to their new driver architecture (with most people suggesting to use the "high quality" open source one that required baking firmware into my kernel (I run Gentoo)) and I had so many issues with both the new open source one and proprietary one that I accelerated my time-to-update-card timeline and went back to NVidia, emerged nvidia-drivers, and have never had a problem since. Nvidia has been rock-solid for me on Linux (even when I first had an old card in 2009-2012 or so) using their proprietary drivers. There's also the continuing fact that while you can get 2 AMDs to match the performance (and cost) of one Nvidia, I'd rather just have the one card every time.

Don't know as I'm right there with you using nVidia myself right now. While I'm going to be picking up a new Ryzen-based system soon, AMD's GPU offerings aren't where they need to be for me to shift away from nVidia yet.

Because both times I bought an AMD (ATI at the time) card, it failed prematurely (out of warranty, but < 2 years of life) and the drivers sucked balls.

Where are you buying graphics cards with less than two years of warranty? If your GPU budget is that slim, you should probably be relying on integrated GPUs.

Probably in every place that is not the European Union which mandates 2 year warranties. Rest of the world iirc is 1-year.

I did check about five brands of AMD graphics card on Newegg US before posting, and didn't see anything shorter than two years, with three and five years quite common. I also once bought an AMD card with a lifetime warranty, though I believe that particular manufacturer has since stopped offering those terms on any of their models.

So the question remains valid: what are the GPUs being sold with super short warranties, and are they even worth buying in the first place?

The situation was much different 5 or 10 years ago.

One year was the best you'd get, 90 days was common.

Even on AMD you can have awful problems. The modeset xorg driver froze for me for a month until someone finally told me there's also the radeon xorg driver, awful.

May I ask what ROCs is and why is it making Nvidia drivers better?

Not ROCs, it's ROCm. AMD's GPU compute libraries. It won't make NVidia better, but will provide an alternative to those who are stuck with NVidia for doing tensorflow, PyTorch stuff.

https://rocm.github.io/

Creating scientific graphics is a much different job than doing graphic design.

Between Gimp, Inkscape and Krita, what are the things not covered in this domain?

It’s worth mentioning Blender 2.8 too. This is software people are leaving top tier commercial 3D apps like Maya for because it is better. The stereotype of unfriendly UI and UX in open software is breaking down and does not have to be a given.

Blender is good for character animation, but it's learning curve is higher and there aren't as many QoL improvements as in other 3d software. 2.8 is a step in the right direction but I still find cinema4d to be much much much faster to get results with for my purposes of motion graphics.

Speed really is the crux of the biscuit. It's not like you can't get the same results using FOSS, but the amount of time and effort to do so is significantly increased.

For some simple photo manipulation Gimp works - but it seems a lot harder to use. Plus it's missing non-destructive adjustment layers, and the brush engine is nowhere near as advanced as photoshop.

Inkscape is similar - everything is a little harder to do - and there's some basic things that don't seem to be in the application at all. Does Inkscape support multiple artboards yet? What about exporting multiple resolutions without duplicating the assets? The symbol support also was very lackluster when I used it last.

Krita lags horribly every time I've tried to use it.

I like the notion that there are open source replacements for these systems.. and I'd love to drop my $50+ per month subscription - but the alternatives aren't yet equivalents.

You're not wrong, but we all know why it's not better: nobody's paying to make it better, so the only way to get it better is via adoption and a larger community actively trying to make it better.

Basically, yes, it hurts, but maybe try using it more? It's certainly better than nothing, which is what we may have if, I dunno, Adobe collapses or something crazy and all our Photoshop licenses suddenly stop working.

You can use such stuff more if you don't want to be productive, and this is coming from a 100% Linux user for nearly half of my life. Unless you write code then the contributions are basically useless.

> but it seems a lot harder to use

I actually feel the exact opposite - it's easier to use than Photoshop - but that's probably because I used GIMP before I ever had access to Photoshop.

100% agree about Inkscape, though.

GIMP: My understanding is that at some point the UI design brahmins at GNOME decided that GTK+ must not support MDI (as in the UI paradigm where you have a container window with subwindows floating around inside it), and moreover the same kind of user interface should be implemented at the top level because a good window manager should be able of keeping an application's windows together. Well, no such window manager ever emerged, and as a result using GIMP is a perpetual search for what workspace a particular tool window disappeared to, or having to fight with it deciding that the minimum size of particular windows (tall toolbars, large viewports) is greater than the 1366x768 of my laptop screen. This is frustrating to the point of unusability.

Krita: Constant random crashes, like seemingly every complex Qt application.

Inkscape: I grew up on CorelDraw so maybe I just have the wrong set of expectations, but the UX is full of papercuts and inexplicable choices. For just one example that annoyed me recently, it seemed completely impossible to get snapping to grids and guidelines to behave; some objects would just refuse to snap to certain targets (different set for each object), and generally the snapping seemed to be based on arbitrary "basepoints" (only one per object; can you change those?) rather than bounding boxes.

(Blender, brought up elsewhere: actually quite good (modulo maybe the confusing refcounting/resource management), once you get on top of the learning curve. I hope 2.8, which I haven't tried yet, hasn't changed this.)

> GNOME decided that GTK+ must not support MDI (as in the UI paradigm where you have a container window with subwindows floating around inside it), and moreover the same kind of user interface should be implemented at the top level because a good window manager should be able of keeping an application's windows together.

This is what macOS does, and does it well. Aqua/Quartz (is it still called that?) doesn't support (or at least doesn't encourage) MDI either, but unlike Windows it's app-centric instead of document-centric, which can annoy some Windows users when ALL of an app's windows come to front when they click on its icon in the dock.

Does gimp feature non-destructive multiple filtering on layers yet ? Photoshop CS2 (and you know why I mention that specific version) from more than ten years ago has it.

Using those tools for professional graphics work is like being a software developer and using notepad as your text editor, or being a chef and using a residential electric stove in your restaurant. Sure, it's possible to achieve similar (or in some cases equivalent) results, but it's just not worth the hassle.

Also, when you're making artwork on a deadline, fooling with virtual machines and things like that just doesn't make sense. There are just too many moving parts. Having to deal with layers of technology is a serious impediment to letting your creativity flow.

I first installed Linux off of floppies in the mid-90s on a hand-me-down 486— my distaste for that workflow isn't born from lack of experience or technical knowlege— it's born from the knowledge of the very real consequences of having an overly complicated toolchain when doing time-sensitive work.

Gimp/inkscape are not drop in replacements for ps/illustrator. Unless your use case is very basic.

Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects? Many people do really need them!

I've gotten way too addicted to DxO. But it runs fine in a VM.

That said, I only use it a couple times a month. If I had to run it professionally, I'm not sure I'd be down.

It depends on the software (and associated hardware if you're talking about graphics) of course, but between wine (and its extensions like proton that are successfully handling many AAA games old and new), qemu, and virtualbox, the need for actually having to dual boot from Linux or have a dedicated Windows box grows less and less each year.

Just wanted to throw out a plug for photopea.com .. discovered it recently and it handles everything that I, as a programmer ever needed from Photoshop.

Woah this is great! Spent about 3 minutes with it, but already like it a lot.

How does it compare to pixlr?

What is it specifically you are needing to run? I only ask because I’ve been running Linux for the last 15 years exclusively, in and out of the commercial corporate world, and have yet to feel limited software wise.

One of the reasons I'm so thrilled with Figma and that it completely covers (and more) what I had to use Sketch for...I'm now seriously entertaining the thought of migrating from Hackintosh (on a laptop) to Linux for my web dev / UXD stuff, and potentially just using KVM / Xen for any rare cases when I'd need OSX...For now, I think I'd just sorely miss Postbox (can anyone recommend a Linux alternative?), that's actually all I can think of...

Had my Linux machine up and running somewhere since the day Linus announced it on minix-list.

Still though, also have my stack of MacBooks.

Apple becoming a Unix vendor lured me to their hardware, which functions as a terminal server in most regards, for my needs. For everything else, there's a fat Linux machine.

Windows: just, no. Only use it if I get paid to use it.

It's the apples and mickies I keep on a shelf "just in case".

I pull them out a few times a year for that odd doc or onerous requirement.

Otherwise I've been happy with debian for a decade.

Guess who's on the board of the Linux Foundation?

At the platinum level, even.

> Perhaps we should all keep and maintain a Linux machine in the event that Apple and Microsoft both decide to screw us over.

It's already happened.