We have to tolerate it because some software isn't available on Linux.

For example, I can't think of one RAW image processor from the original manufacturer that's available on Linux. Honestly, if there was, it would actually be a good reason to switch to that brand.

Also yes, I'm aware of RawTherapee and DarkTable. I use RawTherapee regularly, it's absolutely excellent and I highly recommend it, but it's also absolutely useless for certain use cases.

Nowadays I tend to use linux apps on Windows, thanks to WSL. For example, Windows' file browser crashes frequently on my setup, so I use Dolphin instead.

> RAW image processor from the original manufacturer

I'm active in a few photography spaces online and I don't think I've talked to a single person who actively uses one of those. Most people use Lightroom or Capture One, which are also not available on Linux.

I'm curious as to what value you get from OEM RAW processors.

> I'm curious as to what value you get from OEM RAW processors.

Exactly (or almost) the same render as from SOOC images.

I hate it when I deliver SOOC preview images that the customer really likes, but wants some small tweaks (remove a fly from the image, for example), and the colors or contrast on the resulting image is different because I didn't use the same processing engine or color profiles.

> I'm curious as to what value you get from OEM RAW processors

From what I remember, Nikon RAW files don't retain any changes you made to them in-camera unless you remove them from camera using the OEM app.

(Things may be different these days. My knowledge is from 2015.)

You can do the reverse too. Wine or a vm to run the couple things you still need. If valve can get all their AAA game titles to run using proton, you ahould be able to make it work. I had one tool at work, an xml viewer that was enough better than the competition to be worth running in wine. I stopped even noticing it wasn't a linux app.

This is an advanced task, and if you want to focus on games, this so wrong it hurts. Most new games (and especially AAA titles) need a substantial amount of work to run well on the part of the proton (and sometimes game) developer, very few have good support, less still without some performance penalty, and even less within a few months of release. Thats before you run into driver oddities, and good luck with multiplayer.

The idea that you can slap wine on the few things that you need is a weirdly repeated fiction, it wont make it true by repeating it, stop doing it.

I've never used proton, that was just heresay feom my gamer friends using steam decks. I remember having problems with wine in the late 90s but the single data point of that xml app was really good. I guess I just got lucky. Running a windows vm in linux has never worked as well as the ither way around, but it does work. And for people with critical software that runs on w95 or some version of dos it isn't unusual to keep it in a vm with extremely limited connectivity. Do you think that might be a reasonable approach for the gp?

I tried Wine for a variety of things in the past, but never quite could get it to work right.

Also, some of those software are mission-critical for me, and I can't really afford to use something that may break unexpectedly when I need to deliver images same day.

Sounds like you know what you are doing, wasn't trying to guilt trip anyone, just provide options. Despite the topic of the thread, windows is a much better os than it ever has been. If it is still possible to keep an install on some (potentially older version) running in a vm that would be sufficient mitigation against unscheduled MS decisions interrupting your business. I'm not an IT professional though, I just code.

No guilt trip involved :) Thanks for the suggestions!

> including the forced updates making desktop unusable for hour every month.

Patch day is once a month and takes 15 minutes at worst, sometimes only a reboot after the work day.

See how long it takes on a core i3 with 4GB RAM (to pull a cheap new laptop from walmart: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Lenovo-Ideapad-3i-14-FHD-Laptop-I... )

Not everyone has top of the line or even mid-range hardware.

I got a six year old T460, so I'm not really top of the line either. Nevertheless I don't sit in front of the machine for hours each and every month and watch Windows doing its updates.

People like to dramatically exaggerate how long Windows update bind you each month. Probably no Windows users but it's an easy target.

It doesn’t matter how long it takes if it elects to do it when you want to do something else. Computers are our servants not our managers. Choosing to do something which can neither be deferred or cancelled is unforgivable.

> which can neither be deferred or cancelled

You can defer it.

Update and reboot? Update and shutdown? Reboot/Shutdown without updating now? All three are possible, so it's fine.

I have absolutely seen updates which may not be deferred or refused - and indeed the original post this in this thread details one.

Yeah, but I'm not refering to the original post but to complaints that Windows updates will take hours of your productive time each month for nothing. That's simply not true.

It doesn't matter whether it is hours or one minute, it's unacceptable. A sibling comment here describes how a Windows update started in the middle of a presentation someone was giving, which indicates quite clearly that Windows Updates take productive time away - not just of the user of the computer, but those who were listening also.

Again, computers are our servants, not our managers.

I was at a conference and 5 minutes into the plenary speaker's keynote address, his Windows 10 laptop that he was running his presentation slides from started an obligatory none-cancelable system upgrade. I don't think Microsoft scored any PR points there.

Happens to DJs too.

These posts are perplexing. It's like watching people getting angry because they were pulled over for not renewing their car tabs.

- Everyone knows that car tabs have to be renewed by a deadline and everyone knows Windows has forced updates by a deadline.

- Everyone knows how to pay their car tabs and everyone knows how to check the Windows update so that it updates when you have free time for it. And if they don't, it's just 5 seconds of Googling to find either.

- Everyone knows what happens if they don't renew their car tabs or allow the reboot by a certain date.

- Everyone knows that neither the vehicle licensing authorities nor Microsoft is going to change their policies. It doesn't matter what people think what the policy ought to be because it isn't that way and they know it.

So basically, they picked up a gun, took careful aim at their foot, pulled the trigger, and are shocked and angry that there's a bleeding hole? Sure, they can go ahead and change operating systems but it isn't going to fix the fundamental problem, if you know what I mean.

Actually it would fix the problem. No other operating system forces updates whenever the fuck it feels like, and people should not accept this as a fait accompli.

Also; where the do you live such that there isn’t a grace period on registration renewal? Do you think a car just stops working when that happens in the middle of your commute to work?

> "Actually it would fix the problem."

"Whoosh", as the kids these days say.

> "Also; where the do you live such that there isn’t a grace period on registration renewal?"

There's a grace period for forced reboots for Windows updates too and these users blithely ignored that. So what's your point?

That no other OS forcibly interrupts you to install updates, and that makes Windows tautologically worse than other operating systems.

What’s your point again, with all this bullshit car analogy? And why won’t you post your bad opinions under your real name?

With those specs I would guarantee the update actually takes less than 15 minutes on average each month. I don't remember an update adding more than 1 or 2 minutes on my i5 8gb to my restart time since Windows 11.

Is that a tricky question? A computer like that could never run Windows 11.

The time locked in update is undefined because the first time an update is available, Windows will never terminate downloading and unpacking it.

My main personal laptop is a cheap Walmart house brand Motile laptop from a few years ago.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/MOTILE-14-Performance-Laptop-FHD-...

Installing updates takes less than five minutes once a month.

I have the opposite experience. 4GB of ram + i3-4005U + spinning drive, windows update is unbearable. That's on top of anything newer than 2016 being unusable anyway.

I don't do media on it, so I've been quite happy running 9front lately.

> spinning drive

There's your problem. Even the cheapest of SATA SSD will massively outperform almost any laptop hard disk drive when it comes to random I/O. And it'll probably increase your battery life a smidge as well.

I wouldn't put applications on any spinning rust these days, especially laptop 5400 (or worse!) drives.

$40 for a 512GB SATA SSD that'll blow the socks off whatever spinning drive you have.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/659868/inland-profession...

I don't have the budget for that at the immediate moment, but yes, I know.

I do think my point still stands though. I don't think it's acceptable for software to run this slow, even on this. I'm talking windows has been idling for hours and basic tasks like clicking on the volume slider are sluggish.

> $40 for a 512GB SATA SSD

On a side note: I'm fascinated HOW cheap SSD storage has become. Really looking into changing my backup drives to SSDs instead of good old spinning drives...

I thought this comment was going in a different direction:

It’s amazing how people tolerate the poor usability of windows and then prefer the poor usability of Linux.

Meh, I loathe both.

But after being unable to even _install_ the Win7 downgrade that was promised with my purchase of a Win10-only machine (several years back), I decided Microsoft's obsession with licenses and stuff was just getting in my way. I grabbed Ubuntu and haven't looked back.

Linux is awful for its own reasons, not least of which is a flippant glee with which decades-reinforced UI reflexes are jettisoned in favor of someone's new window-management metaphor-of-the-moment. But those seem easy enough to opt out of, I can tweak a few things and I'm largely fine day-to-day.

Updates tend to break things in weird ways, but I can always just reinstall, or decide it's time to try a new distro, restore /home/ from backup, and go on with my life. A Windows reinstall is usually a multi-day affair and barely works afterward.

My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs. There's an image viewer apparently just called Image Viewer, and if you think that's fucking obnoxious to search for help about, you're right! Ditto with pretty much all the other default GUI tools. I think the file manager is probably called Nautilus but you can't get it to tell you that, you have to just infer that from googling error messages and finding them mentioned in issue-trackers for something called "nautilus". Aaaaagh.

Apple loves giving things generic names, i.e. “Music”. The only reason they get away with it is you can search for “macos $APP”, “Apple $APP”, or “$APP.app”.

Thankfully, they gave the Desktop iPhone Backup Program a nice obvious name.

Oh no they didn't.

> Linux is awful for its own reasons, not least of which is a flippant glee with which decades-reinforced UI reflexes are jettisoned in favor of someone's new window-management metaphor-of-the-moment

That's just Ubuntu.

> My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs

Again it's Ubuntu-specific.

The application name thing is Gnome-, not Ubuntu-, specific.

I argue GNOME is the problem on Linux desktop. I should say thanks for their massive work, but I feel everything is wrong on GNOME.

I don’t use Gnome (want tiling, am able to set up whatever, only use like 3 applications), but feel it’s pretty amazing. My 6-yo with no prior knowledge of computing devices that aren’t an iPad can use it (to launch Scratch, watch videos I loaded, show around his photos, and keep an audio diary) after 10 minutes of explanation, and seems to prefer it for some things over the iPad. My 70+ yo parents (with computing experience starting from the late 1960s, but limited capacity for new bullshit) use it with no issues. My wife uses it for the few tasks she doesn’t do on her phone, and is fine with it. I occasionally use it (as a minimum, to show things to all of them), and it’s very easy to remember how. By comparison, other environments (I include Windows) are overwhelming and have tons of confusing stuff that only gets in the way.

This is all re: vanilla Gnome, not whatever Ubuntu delivers.

Because even with the low bar set by windows, desktop linux is genuinely less usable. If you need anything outside of a browser and encounter a problem you need substantially more understanding of how the OS works get it fixed, not to mention many common use-cases are either not supported or have an inferior less stable version on linux.

For common problems in windows you can find a current guide with pictures in seconds, on linux you are more likely to find a slightly out of date forum. And thats ignoring the complexities of different desktop environments and hardware compatibility.

> For common problems in windows you can find a current guide with pictures in seconds, on linux you are more likely to find a slightly out of date forum. And thats ignoring the complexities of different desktop environments and hardware compatibility.

This actually isn't my experience. It's possible that I only ever have had less common problems on windows, but invariably whenever I've looked something up for that, I've usually found terrible windows support forums with incorrect information and usually no correct solution at all.

For linux, and again I'd consider myself a power user so am familiar with most things, I usually find the information easily and it's quite straightforward. I believe part of this is due to the more technical nature of linux users, and due to there being active stack overflow resources e.t.c. which is far better than windows support forums (both in quality of questions and answers).

Obviously this is a very opinion based position, but I find the opposite to what you've asserted.

It’s not bias, it’s just how it is. If it’s not something bleepingcomputer or tenforums has covered, it’s a nightmare to find an answer for Windows problems. The difference is that most people are scared of the CLI, so they think Linux is harder because of that. When, in actuality, it saves you several seconds of clicking, and gives you far better error reporting.

Windows is a fucking joke of an OS, and that’s why nearly no one defends it on its merits. It’s always defended on the stance of compatibility because of things like O365 and Adobe products. It has nothing to do with the quality of Windows as a platform because as a platform, it’s a pile of shit, and everyone knows it. We’re just forced to deal with it if we want to game, edit photos and music, etc., without a ton of config changes and other hassles.

Command line and config files are really not a great way to learn a system, once you know what you are doing its faster, but arranging the actions you can take in space with something that represents the current state of the system is by far superior for anything new. There are bad GUIs but fundamentally I believe a system where you can see what is going on will always be easier to learn.

M$ forgot whats actually good about their OS, its been slowly metastasizing, but even so I dont think desktop linux is the answer. There are some real advantages to the windows paradigm, the idea that the program and the window are the same thing is important; the application should always show what its doing and what you can do. Settings are selected from all the possible options (you dont need to know whats available in advance)

I have always found that personally as I become more capable I get stranger and more obscure problems with computers, but never less problems. The edge cases and weirdness that you can get help with in an active forum is greater for sure.

When talking about common problems, I mean truly common, the things an average high-school student runs into like joining an online classroom or editing a document (or even playing a game!). These things do fail on linux, and without being a power user that knows where to start and some keywords to search getting past square one is not so easy.

> These things do fail on linux

The only data point I have, is my non-technical partner, who has had far fewer issues since moving to linux than on windows. It's a data point of n=1, and I'm not sure if I'd recommend it for everyone.

I was more than happy to recommend it for her since I know if there is any issue she has, I'll be able to solve it quickly and easily. The fact is though after throwing a standard ubuntu system on the machine I don't think she's had any issues past the first week or two of figuring out where the settings were, and what program does what.

There might have been the odd libre office question maybe?

The fact is, I'm pretty much the family tech support. My linux "support burden" is far lower than my windows "support burden" was when she used that (both in frequency, and for me, complexity). I still get a fair few macOS or iphone questions from my parents from time to time, but almost never things about linux.

> If you need anything outside of a browser

And yet I clearly wrote "basic user"...

Even basic users need to do things outside of a browser. How do you upload pictures from your phone to a Linux desktop?

You plug in your phone, indicate file transfer is ok (on your phone itself, which I assume must be the same for windows) and nautilus gives you the option to browse it.

nautilus, nemo, etc support MTP and have done so for many years. You just plug your phone in and navigate to it in your file manager, which is the same thing you'd do on Windows.

What kind of common use cases are you thinking about? It’s been _years_ since I had any common-use issues with linux.

Bluetooth, email, music, writing, video chat. Everything is just plug and play these days.

Video editing, photo editing, connecting a Focusrite to the machine. Connecting a midi keyboard. Connecting a remote printer. Connecting a Bluetooth headset. Getting usable battery life. Installing software that allegedly supports Linux. All this and more are issues I've had with my Linux installations. Yeah I could have used a different distro, and yes many of these u could solve. But it sure was a pain learning it all.

Trying to disable mouse acceleration for touchpads when running Ubuntu 20.04 (and derivatives) made me lose more than 6 hours of my life.

The culprit was libinput, which, for some reason, ignored the "flat" acceleration profile for touchpads. It was eventually fixed, but the fix didn't hit an LTS version of Ubuntu until this year.

One problem: MS Office.

I know that there's LibreOffice but MS Office definitely beats it in reality.

Yes, I know there's Wine, but I worry (possibly unfounded) that it won't work, or will stop working with some future Office update.

Solution: Office 365. Since it runs in the browser Office 365 will work for the average home user of MS Office on Linux. No it's not the full fat versions of office, but for most home users it's fine.

If you're OK with web version of o365, you're probably fine with libre office.

How many home users need something in MS Office that doesn't exist in Libre?

Libre would be fine for most people but brand recognition and file compatibility are the big things that Office 365 has going for it.

A lot of them. Have you tried to fill out forms (for stuff like homeowner taxes, personal income tax, etc) prepared by the government office in MS Word using LibreOffice Writer? It doesn't work at all, and if it at least opens, the document as well as output is completely fucked.

Anything a tiny bit smarter than your usual document (with scripts and/or macros) won't work too.

I mean, in the past 3 years I've sold a home, rented a place, and bought a home, and filled out my taxes and other forms from .gov websites and haven't had an issue to be honest.

Thank the US government, they're pretty good with the digital things. The EU governments are much worse with computers - Word documents and Excel tables that don't work in LibreOffice are usual here.

Yep. I fixed it with Latex

How did you get VBA working in Latex?

I've always found a mixture of google docs and libreoffice to suffice for me, but I'm not a particularly heavy MS office user.

There's definitely pieces of software that aren't available for linux, and if you require that to do your job, it probably isn't the best solution for you. For me, and my partner (who is a classic browser + office software user, as I suspect 90%+ of computer users are), it's never been a problem (and office software has never been an issue for me personally).

I've worked for a non-profit that is officially Microsoft Office based, and our policy manual say all field staff (who provide their own laptops/computer hardware) need to be able to interact with MS Office file formats. I and an number of colleagues I know have used LibreOffice for years without ever having incompatibility issues with MS Office; for me its been at least 10 years since I've had MS Office on any of my machines... I run Debian or an old ThinkPad, and Mac OS X with MacPorts.

It's not beside the point. The usability of Windows vs. Linux must factor in the availability of software. I would literally be unable to do my job on Linux

>including the forced updates making desktop unusable for hour every month.

Hours is weird way to spell 5min on pc over half of decade old.