VLC walked so MPV could run.
mpv is a fork of mplayer, which preceded VLC by a year or two.
writer, perhaps. calc, not even close - google sheets is unfortunately better in almost every way, and google sheets aren't great either.
This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient.
This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.
...but everyone uses a different 10%.
Something that's useless to you might be a dealbreaker to someone else.
I would guess reliance on excel is declining
It's in the sweet spot of "already installed" and "kinda-sorta database" and "kinda-sorta programming environment" where industrious people can build massive tooling over the years on top of an Excel sheet.
Yes, it could be an Actual Application, but then Legal gets involved (where is the data stored, what's the contract with the supplier), then you need to talk to Finance (Who's paying for this? Justify the cost!), IT (Managing the installations and licenses) and Security (Is the provider following good practices, is the application audited).
...then you decide "fuck that" and just use Excel, it's good enough.
Anecdote:
A programmer friend got promoted a few steps upward quickly and got into the "provide us with reports" level of employment. Their predecessor (a career manager) had spent multiple days each month manually doing the reports.
But a programmer's mind isn't built like that so they used the fact that Excel can pull stuff from HTTP APIs and now the report takes about 15 minutes to build automatically.
In some places, yes, especially where certain online options are good enough.
Definitely not in financial services, and many offices I could mention. Even for me: Excel is the reason I haven't completely binned MS Office. For the subset of features I use⁰ it is better all round¹ than other things I've tried.
I'll miss it significantly when the last Windows machine that I operate away from DayJob is no more.
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[0] Probably less than that 10%
[1] There are many tasks for which there is something better, but the something is different in each case. Excel is a very good jack-of-all-trades.
Frankly, calc is just as full featured as excel is, it's just different. About the only issue calc has is correctly parsing excel docs is notoriously difficult.
This is a familiarity problem, not a calc problem.
CSV import in Excel sucks. LibreOffice Calc is far better there.
Best feature of all in LibreOffice Calc: highlight current row/column, so you have a cross-like cursor.
Easier and better embedding of Python and other languages, not the "Python in the Cloud" crap that Excel does.
Less crappy conversions like "oh, that surely looks like a date, let's mess up your data"...
I'm going through a project at the moment where all the data is held in spreadsheets, and every time anyone opens them Excel fucks the numbers to be "scientific notation" despite there being space to display the full number and no way to disable this anti-feature. The amount of times I've had to restore the spreadsheet from a backed up CSV because of data loss is frustrating. I wish I could stop using Excel.
It sounds like the problem in this case is that you don't know how to use basic Excel features.
You just are mixing up two different problems I've listed into one problem and then made the arrogant assumption that I don't know how to use Excel.
Excel has definitely truncated numbers.
It isn't rounding or truncating while you are actively using the workbook or saving in its native formats, but it does when saving back out to CSV or certain other formats.
As much as I like Excel for many things, it is sometimes the bane of my existence wrt people using it to manipulate tabular data that isn't in its native formats and causing accidental corruption.
One of the many projects on my list of “things I'll never get around to” is a good⃰ CSV (or other text-based tabular data) editor.
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[*] There are actually quite a few that look good, but don't have some of the features behaviours I want, or in some cases are not available on an appropriate platform (there are a couple of Mac only options for instance), or are paid proprietary apps that are surprisingly expensive (I could justify it and get work to pay in DayJob, but not for my own use).
In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Yesterday, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/21/23926585/microsoft-excel...
Also it drops leading zeros which is annoying when a column is zip codes and it should be imported as string and not number
I agree excel gives ways around these and maybe that's considered basic knowledge but it definitely has poor data-mangling defaults
It's not the case that calc is lacking any features which excel has in a finance situation.
Not sure what you mean by this exactly, but I work in banking with a lot of "financial professionals", and the general opinion is that Excel is not good because it screws with numbers, whether its scientific notation (Why? Its just as long as the original number), rounding of numbers (had that with a large list of account numbers just last week where half the account numbers lost the last 3 digits) and there is no easy way of saying "just treat these as entered".
Even setting fields to text doesn't stop Excel from fucking around and overriding them to be date formatted if it feels like the balance could be.
The main issue is that Excel comes with Office and you aren't allowed to install other software so it forces you to use it and get used to it. It really wouldn't take much to be better than Excel.
Both xlsx can be exported and imported. It is just harder
mac - if you need battery
> writer, perhaps. calc, not even close
For what I see 99% of people do in excel (make a table, then sort it and draw some charts), calc would support all their uses just fine.
For those using it for actual accounting/financial stuff with equations in the cells, and custom macros, etc ... then no, calc won't be sufficient.
The real issue is familiarity and importing, but if you start fresh, LibreCalc is better for me.
excel runs the world, and I mean that unironically.
What kind of software isn't working?
Another example (which is not licensed, and easier to test for) is Jw_cad https://www.jwcad.net/download.htm which actually installs and runs, it's just that it doesn't run well. Some stuff works, but it's not enough to make it usable.
Yes, because as you said these applications only run on Windows. How else would you get around it, if not by running some form of Windows? At least this way, the core system (and 90% of general purpose applications) could remain on Linux.
> I don't have a Windows license either so I expect I wouldn't be able to anyway.
You can just use the install unlicensed, or, if your computer came with a Windows license (as most do), you can extract it from the motherboard and use it to activate the VM. Not sure if that's allowed in Microsoft's ToS though.
In any case, I'm not going to try to set up a Windows VM on my Linux computer, I don't have the room or if I had it would be better used for other things. And I just abhor using Windows, whenever I have to use the wife's PC it's hell. For her, too.. she can't find anything after she's saved something, for example. And I don't have a Windows license, never had, my computers are all bare when new. In any case, it defies the whole purpose of not having to run Windows. Now, with Windows 11, it seems to be even worse. And I have zero idea on how to install Windows from scratch anyway - in my case I would probably even have to install a Japanese version, as is installed on my wife's PC. Well, not going to happen.
Also, unless you're talking about desktop motherboards that you bought directly from the manufacturer, any laptops you have almost certainly have an embedded OEM Windows license key burned into them from the factory (and that's obviously without getting into any massgrave chicanery).
I suppose the difference in our views is pragmatic versus philosophical. I don't care whether something is running through a translation layer on Linux or technically "on Windows" in a stripped-down VM with telemetry removed, so long as my core system remains Linux and I can minimize my exposure to Windows without any application support hurdles.
(Krita is pretty awesome though, it's up there with Blender for me)
GIMP also has an excellent print interface. Krita doesn't have one at all.
Krita has them both destructively, and non-destructively as transform layers. What is it you're missing?
Adjust levels in photos.
They are all available as non-destructive filter layers, by the way, and Krita users had access to this way before GIMP 3.0 was released with non-destructive filters.
[1] https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.ht...
Honestly, I did not know that these existed in Krita (when I used Krita, I did not find them).
However, I still stubbornly maintain that I answered the question sufficiently, which used the qualifier "with a better UI".
Taking a leaf out of my wife's book "Even when I'm wrong, I'm right!* :-)
(Yeah yeah, I know I was wrong)
> There are no uploads. Photopea runs on your device, using your CPU and your GPU. All files open instantly, and never leave your device.
It's developed by a single guy, which I think is very impressive given how much of Photoshop's functionality it has. I just really wish it were open source (and not a web app).
they bring up a valid point: libreoffice is (in their opinion) harder to use and probably lower quality, so reports are harder to write and taking away time from more important things.
in my opinion libre office is absolutely good enough for this use case and thus not taking away significant time from other tasks. furthermore, the austrian armed forces are free to contribute to the project to improve the perceived paint points themselves.
on the other hand microsoft products are closed source and probably upload data to datacenters outside the customers (i.e. in this case, the militaries) sphere of influence. this may include the data (for storage and or AI training) and meta data (for advertising and telemetry).
microsoft may even silently introduce or reactivate (after they've been declined) those options after updates (don't quote me on this, but i think i remember this happening at least once).
microsoft apologists may argue that this is only the case for improperly configured corporate deployments, but as the software is closed source nobody can really be sure and if it's that hard to get right, it's a security problem in itself.
They almost certainly have templates for their reporting, so its just adding text, figs, and tables. And lower quality how?
The Linux answer is often repeated but unfortunately, some users depend on various Windows software that only runs properly on Windows. E.g. CAD/CAM, Quicken finance, sewing embroidery, etc can't run in a Linux WINE emulator nor QEMU/KVM virtual machine. And avoiding the WINE/KVM incompatibilities by switching to "Linux-native" software such as Gimp often means having less features and/or not having ability to open old files because they use different formats.
Sure, there's the idea that "90% of users just use email and surf the web so they can just get by with a Chromebook" ... true, but there's still a lot of users who can't because they use other productivity software.
For me, there's always some unexpected situation that requires a working Windows computer. Last year, I had to do an unplanned firmware update on a digital audio interface via a USB cable. There was no Linux updater. They had a firmware updater for macOS but it didn't work. Based on the tech support forums, I had to download the firmware updater for Windows platform and that finally worked.
reply to: >What software do you have that doesn't work in a VM?
Example would be software that use hardware USB dongles for DRM. E.g. embroidery software for sewing machines. The passthrough USB emulation to the vm is not invisible enough to fool the software searching for hardware dongles. Another example was Trimble software for LIDAR that depended on DirectX which crashed in a vm.
reply to: >A good-enough compromise is a dual boot with a tiny Windows partition for the rare cases
That is a very techie solution that's not practical for "normies". Dual-boot creates the "2 os file systems" issue instead of having a single unified disk mount. Windows doesn't have a built-in way to read Linux ext4 file system. Linux doesn't have a bulletproof reliable way to read/Write NTFS partition (various tech forums mention data corruption). Unless one goes external with external NAS hardware and store all documents on an SMB mount -- but that also layers on more technical issues and doesn't work for laptops on-the-go being disconnected from the NAS.
Also, the extent to which windows is needed to accommodate uneducated operators is overstated. A lot of industrial equipment runs other oddball operating systems configured by the manufacturer and machine operators don't need to know the difference because they just know which buttons to press to get the job done.
- Some machines use embedded MCUs with no operating systems. I haven't seen one of these in the last 15 years. The last DNA extraction machine we got (a glorified sample shaker with 2 stepper motors) runs Win10! It has no keyboard, no network, and absolutely no ports of any kind (or at least not accessible without dissasembling the machine). A 8051 could do the job and still have memory left for Pong. [1]
- Very old machines run MSDOS and a proprietary software that directly talks to hardware ISA boards via I/O ports - no drivers. That software can't be ported to Windows2000+ because of the same reasons DOS games can't run in Win2000 - the kernel won't allow direct hardware access. Linux doens't allow it either.
- Newer machines run Windows 2000/XP/7/10, many of them offline. Some of them were updated to run Win10 from older versions, with the same app version (just Windows updated).
- Since Win10 can no longer be bought, newer machines run Win11 with permanent internet connection and they are minimally customized - the vendors left all ads, Copilot, Store and the kitchen sink installed. It's atrocious to work with those, but nobody cares. The management that make the decisions to buy the machines never ever touch them or even see them, and they don't take advice or feedback from us (or anyone else but accounting).
Are you perhaps not aware of the millions of embedded Linux installations that never see the internet?
Windows owns the industrial space for historical reasons, mostly to do with OPC being Windows-only and software for doing maintenance on field devices originally running on DOS. It quickly became a chicken-and-egg situation - everyone wrote their software for Windows because everyone else wrote their software for Windows. SCO owned a decent chunk of the field before that, but we know how that worked out.
We're seeing some change now that OPC is being phased out. Ignition now has feature parity between Linux and Windows (barring OPC, of course). Windows won't go away any time soon (if ever), but you can now have a fully functioning SCADA system with no Windows at all.
Your go/no-go decision tree
1) If your MacBook Pro is Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3): Running Split Second in Parallels with Windows 11 ARM is a no-go because the Sentinel/HASP hardware key that Split Second uses is not supported on Windows ARM. Thales (the dongle vendor) is explicit: “Sentinel HASP keys … are not supported” on Windows ARM; LDK works via emulation but not the HASP/HASP-HL USB keys you plug in.
You can feed it the output from Kicad, and if you include the ipc netlist it’ll even generate models. Great for doing a check before manufacturing, especially if the viewer matches what you see in Kicad.
Unfortunately I’ve never gotten it to run in wine.
[0] https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/microsoft-office-365-declared...
Players like mpv are way better unless you want to use nightly build of v4
Not on Android yet though.
Just how new does the new stuff have to be? I use VLC daily (because even though we have 4x streaming services, when I want to watch 3rd Rock from the Sun, it's not on any of them.
Some of the very new movies are also not on any of the streaming services, so I am left wondering, if I downloaded a movie that was only torrented a few days ago, just how new does the movie have to be to be unsupported by VLC?
I really appreciate VLC for how it can play just about anything, but it's a "player of last resort" for me.
OnlyOffice is made by a Russian company that doesn't condemn war of aggression that Russia wages against Ukraine.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j7zlf2/onlyoffi...
* Doesn't condemn war (understandable in their position)
* Has dev team in Russia
* Pays taxes to Russia, which directly fuel war
* Does not support UAF or donate to Ukraine (also understandable)
* Keeps selling their software in Russia, which might have links to military and administration
Am I missing something here?
The fact that all of the above is being presented as an exclusively Russian strategy. When almost all companies mentioned on this website are proudly and directly tied to non-Russian war industries. The tendency to omit pointing out non-Russian examples almost always indicates endorsement of their actions.
And let me beat you to this that I condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin. Unlike those who believe it is ok to side with one and not the other even if they do the exact same.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, none of our hands are clean. We all deal with our complicity in various ways, and draw our lines in the sand where we will, but at the end of the day survival in this world forces us all to be hypocrites.
And this whole falsely applied narrative is unironically a very frequent laundering tactic of their proponents.
And btw I don't even think most are really willing to accept the accusations of the American companies, as they've been told for centuries that these are the good guys.
I'm not drawing an equivalency between consumer and producer, I'm pointing out a relationship which, while unequal, still exists and needs to be acknowledged. I'm not attempting to derail or minimize anything. You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
It seems like you're holding onto your initial position, applying the factually true statement:
no ethical (as in a way of not contributing to others' exploitation) consumption is currently possible
Instead of talking about the way it's currently shaped to be ran by those who are profit-driven, violently steal resources and contribute to exhaustion of all peoples around the world, you're simplistically reducing it to a matter of entire groups of people, ignoring their standing in the social strata, having to either choose primitivism or accept they're just as bad as their rulers. Even if you've disclaimed that you're not concealing any motives and the responsibility is unequally distributed, your adherence on shifting away from those in charge of the means of production, which is how you've chosen to initiate this very exchange, enables an interpretation of you implicitly defending them, and I believe that's also what anyone with an ounce of critical thinking ability would make of. I would be less critical if you at least suggested organization against the existing way the global socioeconomical system as an alternative, but the appeal to the adherence to an archaic lifestyle suggests this is not something you'd probably approve of. A positive surprise would be taking this for granted and you just condemning those willing to comply all along I suppose?
And throughout the entire history, it has been shown that these are the exact same accusations that have insidiously been made by whoever is directly behind exploitative administrations. They put the blame on those who are always barred from having any say/questioning the way their labor is being used, divide them, deject their protests and prevent overthrowing.
> You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
This whole narrative here really boils down to the Oh you like music? name every song meme.
P.S. I'd advise refraining from appealing to imaginary emotional reactions on behalf of the other party. It usually demonstrates inability to defend a particular view and deflects from meaningful dialogue.
Where did I ever present those as exclusively Russian strategy?
> When almost all companies mentioned on this website are proudly and directly tied to non-Russian war industries.
So?
It is really not the limiting factor in Linux desktop adoption. The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
Buy the wrong laptop, and you have to fight with X, wayland and Nvidia graphics like a terminally inclined caveman in danger
Spoken like a true techbro. This attitude is so incredibly destructive. Technology is how we mediate our lives, cutting a very large number of citizens out of that is simply wrong, even if 'the numbers just aren't there' (and they are!).
Anyway, I think the CLI approach of Linux is way more accessible than the more GUI oriented approach of Windows/MacOS.
Did I advocate for lack of accessibility features ? I just pointed out that in this context there are things far higher in the priority list. Especially given the fact that there are accessibility features, just not on par with windows.
Do you seriously believe that improving accessibility would have a higher impact in Linux adoption than improving robustness and hardware compatibility ?
I was writing assembly before you were alive buddy ;)
Yes, absolutely. Linux is plenty robust and has lots of hardware that you can use today. The reasons people end up not using it are:
- Microsoft
- Lack of favorite application 'x' (see: Microsoft)
- Difficult to use (unfamiliarity plays a role here)
So yes, accessibility is a key factor, and not just for the people that have challenging bodies.
It is flooded by complaints about HW incompatibilities, HW acceleration not working etc. Haven't been able to find complaints about accessibility.
Furthermore, what is the percentage of visually impaired people in the US and what is the percentage of linux desktop users ? The numbers speak for themselves.
But surely there can be a point in which there are larger problems than that Linux reached 5% adoption this year in the US:
https://ostechnix.com/linux-reaches-5-desktop-market-share-i...
That's better than what it was. It's also not a whole lot. But you must understand, the more people use Linux, the better it becomes. Even if value accessibility over other matters, increasing the market share surely will increase the amount of people working on accessibility too.
And hardware compatibility issues are? The fact that orders of magnitude more people don't use Linux at all, disabled or not, because of lacking features or usability is optional?
If 5% of people is an insane number of people, surely usability for them all is more important than for a fraction of that? And again, this is not a product sold by a corporation. Leave features behind and adoption goes down, then you get no accessibility features at all. If you want more accessibility features, you want more developers. For that you want more usage.
Since you're such a noble white knight, why don't you code up those accessibility features you think are the most important missing part ? I'll wait.
Things that challenge accessibility plugins challenge any plugins. Steps away from accessibility are always steps towards lock-in.
> The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
But you seem to desire this. Don't buy the wrong laptop if you like lock-in; Apple and MS aren't making their OS compatible with your every hardware whim. Or learn how to reverse-engineer and write drivers.
In general, unless you need advanced Excel features, you can switch to linux.
[0] e.g. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-cant-help-break-window... and couple others
While email is asynchronous and I can live with not seeing it all the time (I check it occasionally anyway), the calendar feature is a must, and specifically the reminders. This is why I cannot live without Outlook launched, and it reminds me of meetings I would miss otherwise.
It is the poster child for enshittification.
Or maybe you're talking about needing Exchange integration? I don't know what the state of that is on Linux these days.
The integration to Exchange is key as well, I need to have access to rooms, PSTs etc.
There is enough issues running games on Linux that there are specific distros created for running games because everything from the kernel version, X/Wayland, Compositor and the pipewire version can affect immensely how well the game runs.
There are also other issues around how well those games work. Some games will work perfectly fine. I am not disputing that. It is a bit of a lottery though e.g. I had annoying sound issues with Hell Divers 2 that was only fixed with an update to pipewire. Performance issues were solved by upgrading to Kernel 6.16.
On Windows I had to do literally nothing for the game to work perfectly (also don't believe some of YouTubers that are complaining HD2, their PCs were actually broken!).
Generally on Windows I have to do very little to get a game to work, outside of extremely old games from the late 90s/early 2000s.
It really seems like you aren't reading what I said. I accept that old games will often work fine, provided they are on a store like GoG or Steam. Big budget releases are often what people want to play.
> If those are the games you really want to play then Windows is the answer, have fun ponying up your drivers license to Microsoft for the privilege of getting root kitted by those games.
It isn't about what I want. It is about what is the reality for the vast majority of people. I would rather everyone play games that work on Linux. Unfortunately many of the people I play games like playing new titles, often they only work well on Windows. There is a social aspect of this that many people on here ignore.
> Literally everything else just works on Linux, one click install and play through steam, no bullshit fiddling around.
They don't though. There are always odd issues with games e.g. borderless window doesn't work in a lot of games, because the mouse will get lost. Having that happen mid-match sucks, having fullscreen window has it own draw backs. I won't get into performance and sound issues as I've already explained the issues there.
These things are mass market slop which are engineered to be bland and predictable to make the most reliable returns for institutional investors. Discerning consumers know better and don't go by what's popular.
There are plenty of popular franchises that I've liked in the past. There are plenty of "slop" movies that I enjoy, I really like Mission Impossible movies, Fast and Furious movies. I've also liked some of the Call of Duty games. There is room for both.
Is there much value there for users or the linux platform? Some definitely, but it's not going to move the dial much compared to if say valve, codeweavers, or someone else could work with EA to get an agreeable solution that lets Battlefield6 work on linux, as an example with a large audience that's locked into windows to play what they want.
I live fine without a console, so I live fine without a Windows gaming PC too. I don't think the AAA chasers have more fun than me when it comes down to it, dealing with these companies seems to be an aggravating affair even if you do everything the way they want.
I run into more problems with Linux than I do typically with Windows. I've been using Linux on and off since 2002. I don't particularly mind it, but I also don't pretend it is for everyone.
If you play single player games with no or limited online features you'll be fine in 99% of the cases (number pulled from my ass).
As for GIMP, while I understand it can do many things as Photoshop, it is not close in terms of features and the UX is unfortunately terrible.
Read this: https://gist.github.com/stdNullPtr/2998eacb71ae925515360410a...
No one reached directly for kernel-level anti-cheat. It was the result of an escalation of the sophistication of cheating solutions.
People who work with Photoshop have never worked with any other thing. The way they learned to edit bitmaps was through Photoshop. They can't separate the act and the product in their heads. Thank god for Affinity getting into the mix.
One just has to deal with GIMP as it is, and stop trying to project Photoshop paradigms onto it. People just need to stop thinking of FOSS as the generic, off-brand or ersatz versions that pass or fail due to their degree of imitation of some other product.
IMO, every step GIMP takes towards Photoshop UI is a regression. GIMP's problems have been technical, such as color management and non-destructive editing, and they're gradually falling away.
that is never the solution. that is the workaround. workarounds are not solutions.
VLC is a broken mess and has always been a broken mess.
Epic Games bought out rocket league and turned off a native linux build and faced no repercussions. Instead they made plenty of money.
That's the bar.
That said, devices like the SteamDeck run games on Linux (and that's without considering that every Android game ever is technically running on Linux too).
Let's face it though, PC gaming is already small enough these vs the consoles, that further splitting the marked isn't going to make sense for a lot of companies.
No. All the articles and testimony of game devs abandoning native Linux versions is from well before Proton was a thing, including Epic Games buying Rocket League and preventing you from playing the Native Linux build they had.
It also was not related to anti-cheat or underlying engine limitations or anything. Developers were clear that the problem was the massive lack of uptake mixed with a weirdly entitled community.
The last 10 years of AAA gaming have been an absolute shit show. The only people who seem to be even trying are Nintendo. Everyone else releases stuff that's buggy as hell and about as fun as a dental cleaning.
It's one thing to choose not to develop a new game for Linux. It's another to take a game that already runs on Linux and intentionally break it. You're guaranteed to alienate SOME people who are already fans of the game.
I once tried to play Trackmania Nations (not Forever or United Forever, the ESWC one) because that was the first entry of this series I played. I still have all the files from back then so I thought it would be as simple as installing it and running it. Other games such as Trackmania Sunrise came with the nasty SecureROM DRM that will break your current installs, but ESWC was always free to play and without DRM.
Well, after install, I played a lot in my first sitting. A few days later, my Windows install was broken. I used a restore point before installing Trackmania, everything was back to stable. A few weeks later I tried again, same situation, a day or two after install, my Windows would break.
I thought it was a general system instability, maybe some weird configuration and the game only triggers that specific bug. So I did a full clean reinstall. And installed the game a few days later. Who would've thought, my Windows breaks yet again.
What I'm trying to say is: I've been running Fedora on my main PC for 2 years now and the game has been installed via Proton for 1 year. It never broke, it always just worked.
I think you will really like this content.
And VLC is a superb media player, I use it on all platforms for like 10 years, nothing even compares to it.
I have always preferred pinta for normal usage editing and although this might be shunned but idrc, but sometimes photopea can be also good software.
Regarding desktop environmnents, Just try anything you find interesting, KDE,XFCE,Cinnamon etc., you would be shocked by how snappy/minimalist somethings like XFCE are.
Personally I am on hyprland in cachy os.
Well, I am certainly chuckling now. That is a joke I have never heard before, but I get it! How witty you are.
Tee hee.
Modern GIMP doesn't have the features that Photoshop 6.0 had 25 years ago, and GIMP had a 5 year head-start on it.
Unfortunately, the authoritarian PIAs that develop GIMP have a rigid and inflexible mindset that stop GIMP becoming the default for millions of Photoshop users and or those who cannot afford Adobe's outrageous prices, and those who can no longer accept its draconian licensing terms.
In short, millions would switch to GIMP on Linux if it worked 'properly'.
I don't know why the Linux community doesn't put more pressure on GIMP's developers to comform. The percentage of Linux desktop users would increase considerably if they would.
Look at it this way: here's just one GIMP issue that turns away Photoshop users: why did GIMP's developers remove the perfectly functioning Fade feature in GIMP?
Yes, I know their stated reason and I also know the workaround but it's a damned nuisance to use.
By removing the Fade feature GIMP's 'high minded' developers have effectively done what mathematical types tried to do with the calculator when they introduced RPN/Reverse Polish Notation in place of the standard way of entering data.
Except for mathematicians, engineers, etc. RPN failed spectacularly—sure it is better but just too hard for mere mortals to grasp.
The bloodymindedness of GIMP's developers are deliberately holding back GIMP's adoption. They could have easily left Fade in place and just added their fancy sophisticated option for their propeller-head brethren to use.
Fixing some of GIMP's problems seems so obvious I sometimes think Adobe has placed a Trojan on GIMP's team to thwart competition.
No, I wouldn't; because I'm still annoyed and my frustration goes deeper than just GIMP and its developers, my issue is that the problems that plague GIMP also plague much open source software and we need to find solutions.
First, I'm a vehement supporter of FOSS and the need for more choice in the marketplace even if that means having more commercial software to choose from. As I see it, much of the key software (Windows, Android, MS Office, Photoshop, etc.) that monopolizes market now does so because of Big Tech's market domination—not necessarily because it's the best available.
It's the sheer domination of the software ecosystem by Big Tech that's the problem, thus good open source products such as Linux, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc. all struggle to get a mainstream airing irrespective of quality.
It's clear to me there are several important reasons why open source has not achieved a wider penetration amongst more general/less technical users. From that perspective FOSS software suffers from a fundamental and systemic problem which is it's principally developed by people who like developing code for its own sake who then open-source it for free.
Without the monetary incentive one doesn't have the right to demand of them the form software should take. Dictating how software should work and or what features it must have would serve little or no purpose, if they'd disagree they'd either ignore you or just pack up and leave the project.
The problem is obvious, FOSS developers are skilled and it's that skill that directs the way they'll tackle a project—thus the software ends up working their way and with features they reckon it should have—and more often than not this is in direct conflict with the way ordinary nontechnical users want it to work.
Despite my narky comments about GIMP's developers, I understand that in their technical judgment they had good reason why they omitted the Fade feature and I accept they are under no obligation to include a feature that from their perspective is out of place and does not logically dovetail with other features. Given also they're offering their time for free then there's really not much one can object to in the circumstances.
Nevertheless, that FOSS developers first and foremost develop software as they see fit and from their perspective and that that view often clashes with the requirements of nontechnical users poses a serious conundrum for open source software. The upshot clear: if ordinary users see no real advantage and or find it too difficult to convert to FOSS then it won't attract the number of users it deserves.
With commercial software user requirements are often determined by marketing based on user demand and programmers are obliged to program accordingly. When Microsoft says "we're about to start on yet another GUI for the next version of Windows" the choice is stark—knuckle down or leave. Without the monetary incentive, FOSS is at a significant disadvantage.
Let me offer my own perspective here. I am an IT professional and have been for decades. Moreover, I've headed an IT department where help-desk was a key service and from experience I know how difficult it is to get users to adopt new software packages, especially so when the replacement package offers essentially the same features, for example, replacing MSO with LibreOffice often meets with stubborn resistance.
Even I get annoyed when I have to change software and I find the UI and or features are noticeably different to what I'm used to. I'm an Arch user so I'm used to tweaking Linux et al but I deal with hundreds of different packages on Linux, Android, Windows and other setups and it's dead easy to forget the idiosyncrasies of a package that one hasn't worked with for several months. Having to relearn its features and quirks because its so different to what one was working on only moments before is not only time consuming but also a damn nuisance.
So from my perspective standardization is just about everything. Trouble is programmers all to often consider themselves 'artists' and unnecessarily keep reinventing the wheel. Look at the outrageous plethora of Windows GUIs. MS started out well by adopting IBM's well thought out CUA (Common User Access)† then essentially abandoned it for others that were often grossly inferior—think Metro for instance. And what about MSO's 'Ribbon'? The heretic(s) who devised that should have been condemned to time in the stocks. The unmitigated fucking hide of them to force millions of users to waste millions of manhours relearning functions that didn't need to be relearned. What is so outrageous was that after mandating the change to the 'Ribbon' those authoritarian shits at Microsoft could easily have left the old GUI there as a fallback option—but they didn't!
Who paid for those millions of wasted hours? Right, it certainly wasn't Microsoft.
This kind of outrageous and unacceptable behavior is why it's so important that FOSS be easy to convert to and be as compatible with the commercial product as is possible. With its Windows monopoly MS can afford to experiment with GUIs and weather the changes when they fail and still survive unscathed but I'd contend that in this regard FOSS is much more vulnerable.
In this regard we've witnessed a long lineage of failures in converting Windows users to Linux due to compatibility issues, despite the Linux brotherhood praising its simplicity the fact is that Linux is just too different to Windows for millions to make the leap. The problem is further compounded with the myriad of Linux distros available—and I'd venture that most Linux diehards have no idea the fear that that number of distros generates in newbies. FOSS developers should heed the message.
I am firmly convinced that the lack of consistency across FOSS development and its failure to adhere to uniform standards in the many instances where it's possible and logical to be consistent is a major impediment to its widespread adoption.
The other impediment slowing down FOSS adoption harks back to the fact that open source is free and without monetary incentives is that there are no guarantees that a FOSS project won't end up as abandonedware. I've long advocated a halfway revenue-neutral measure where certain FOSS projects only offer the source for free and charge a small nominal amount for binaries with licenses stipulating that one's only allowed to compile the source for one's own use—distribution thereof is prohibited. It seems to me most users would prefer to pay a small nominal amount of say $10 or $20 for the binaries. That way, developers could receive some recompense for their work, then they would have both the incentive to remain with the project and also likely to be more responsive to users' requirements.
I know I'm not alone in coming to these ideas, after I posted the above comment I came across this HN story that addresses very similar issues:
"Free software scares normal people" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45760878
I'd urge you to read it.
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90% of Windows games run on Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736925
LibreOffice is an okay office suite (good enough for my purposes): https://www.libreoffice.org/
GIMP is a good image editor: https://www.gimp.org/
VLC is a good media player: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/