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2023 year of Linux desktop!!1
Idc if we are not on reddit anymore, this joke doesn’t get old
Like the year of the linux desktop
That joke is not of Reddit origin, mostly news sites clickbaited with that headline
nah dude, that was like 5 years a go
https://youtu.be/N4FlL1FCbvA Time for your annual viewing of year of linux desktop promo video!!
I technically started with Steam Deck and finally took the plunge of partitioning my daily driver to install Linux Mint back a few weeks ago.
No regrets…
I’m a developer (web app predominantly ) and find I can use it for about 80% - 85% of my daily workflow. Things I miss and can’t substitute are mainly around image editing / vector editing where GIMP and InkScape are just not there for the way I work.
Loving my time with it and would highly recommend anyone on the fence take the dive and give Mint a go. It’s incredibly familiar the moment you boot it :)
I’ve been on Linux for a while and at this point must people use their computers as glorified thin clients for Chrome.
This has made Linux way more viable as a day to day OS. Valve is working very hard to make games viable and is seeing some success.
The major blind spots remain industry specific software outside of software dev. Things like Adobe suite and Microsoft office for example. They often have a Linux equivalent but it rarely fits well into industry standard work flows.
Microsoft office
I’m rather impressed with the MS Office compatibility and comparability of FreeOffice - https://www.freeoffice.com/ The free version trails the paid by one release… seems like a fair compromise. It’s not pure FOSS, so purists might not like it, but it really gets the job done, especially with rountripping documents. There are always corner cases where things go boink, but hell… things even go off the deep end between versions of MSO.
Many of today’s applications are now just web apps. The proportion of actual native applications that users run has been shrinking for a while, and so the differenced in native application support become less important.
That’s exactly what he said, and then he also said except for industry-specific software like video editing, graphic design, etc, where big companies don’t offer a Linux version and the alternatives aren’t quite up to par. It’s true there’s Offcie 365 online but it’s still subpar compared to the real deal, like if you’re a PowerPoint or Excel power user or really need Access or another specialized program.
I’m all for Linux, these big companies have just eaten a lot of the market and refuse to play nice.
except for industry-specific software like video editing
Unless you’re referring to Abode directly, the video and VFX industry has a much bigger presence on Linux.
All the major software offerings (except for Adobe) not only have Linux versions, but some are also first-class offerings on Linux.
Ok, I don’t actually know if it’s “all”, but it’s definitely most.
It’s been a few decades since I got into it, but can you tell me the best Linux alternatives to Adobe Premiere / After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and AVID? I’ve tried a few and they tend to have problems with crashing and overall limited functionality.
Probably the best alternative to Premier is KdenLive or DaVinci.
As for After Effects, I’m not too sure. The alternatives definitely exist, I’m just not sure which one to recommend. It’s been years since I’ve done any compositing. But I use KdenLive for video editing regularly and it’s great.
In fact, the past year of development has been monumental in the amount of improvements and new features.
DaVinci Resolve replaces all of these and does it better (ok maybe not AVID, but I don’t know much about that one, so maybe).
Man resolve is soooo good, UI is awesome,live saves are black magic, fusion page is straight up God sent and is fuck ton faster than Adobe suit. And not to mention one time purchase.
Huh now I know. Never heard of it before. I use OpenShot which is FOSS but it’s meh.
I distinguish between web applications and thin clients. When I was in the business, a thin client meant you ran everything through one instance of Chrome, but today’s web applications don’t work that way. They each bring their own Chrome with them. It’s much less memory efficient but allows them more control over what version is running their app. Also, many web app based applications still have special extensions to expose features Chrome normally wouldn’t.
It’s possible the terminology has changed over 10 years.
I’m a Linux developer who’s made Electron apps, I have complete and total understanding of everything you’re saying. You don’t seem to be understanding the thing we’re saying, which is that if you really really need a specific Microsoft or Adobe product, your best option is still Windows or Mac since Wine isn’t very good. This is a fault of those corporations, not technology.
I really need to stop drinking.
We’re here to support you in your journey to sobriety, brother!
This hits the nail on the head… I can get by with GIMP or InkScape or Photopea but they don’t quite cut it when I have job going out worth a few grand I want all the tools, checks peace of mind of the locally installed app. I also find GIMP convoluted to achieve basic tasks. Even things like resizing images to canvas etc. Feels clunky by comparison to say Affinity Photo.
Either way, I can never get 100% away from the big boys as ultimately I have to test natively in Windows and Mac OS so it’s not the end of the World having to boot into Windows or Mac OS occassionally to undertake the tasks required :)
Things like Adobe suite and Microsoft office for example. They often have a Linux equivalent but it rarely fits well into industry standard work flows.
I’ve been contemplating forking NextCloud to create a faster, less buggy alternative focusing mostly on the core functionality of office software and storage rather than an ever increasing amount of new modules, but not only would I need a team of developers, I’d also need to monetize it straight out of the gate, because I can’t pay a bunch of developers out of my own pocket. With NextCloud being AGPL, the fork would also be AGPL, of course. And I hate PHP, so this would involve a full backend rewrite to Rust or Go, which also renders the whole thing a pipe dream.
Welcome to Linux! I’ve been using it since 1996 and doing design using FOSS tools for years. (At first, I needed to a separate computer for Adobe products for years, but switched full time to Linux a long time ago.)
A couple of quick suggestions of other apps to try:
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Krita, for image editing & painting https://krita.org/
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Penpot, for UI layouts (including website design), prototyping, and flow; a great replacement for Figma and Miro. https://penpot.app/
There’s a big list of FOSS design & photography software @ https://pixls.us/software/
And a huge list of alternatives @ https://codeberg.org/RayJW/awesome-foss#user-content-creativity (linked to creativity, but there’s tons more on that page)
+1 for Krita. I’ve been using Linux since 2015, and to this day haven’t completely got my head around GIMP. I know Krita is designed for a different purpose, but it’s a lot easier to use for quick touch-ups, which is all I want.
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Have you tried Krita for image editing? I prefer it to gimp
I haven’t tried that, will definitely give it a look… Thanks for the suggestion ! Much appreciated;)
While I’ve used Linux on and off for years, the steam Deck was really the thing that convinced me that I can actually drop Windows. My laptop has been ruining mint for a few months, and it’s working for me. My desktop is going to be fully switched soon
Have you tried photopea.com?
Have you tried https://www.photopea.com/ ?
Hi there, yea I have tried it and kudos to the developer it’s an awesome piece of kit.
Unfortunately, for me at least it’s just not the same as running native Affinity Suite (which is my go to). We occassionally produce print work for clients as well as developing UX templates and I can’t seem to replicate my workflow in Photopea or any of the other available apps. I wish Affinity would produce a Linux version but when asked, they said the uptake just wasn’t there to make it worth their while :(
I’m really pleased I have managed to move the bulk of my work over to Mint and ultimately, I will always be left having to test applications natively in Windows and Mac OS so it’s not the end of the World I suppose as I can’t ever fully get away from them.
What do you use for office?
Not OP but, I use libre office on the Linux machines at work.
Although I heard about OnlyOffice on Lemmy a few days ago… It looks interesting. I want to try it out!
I switched to onlyoffice a few months ago from libre, and I like it a lot better.
Be aware that OnlyOffice is developed by Russians and headquartered in Latvia, it may be perfectly fine but it’s worth being aware of. At least one company claims to have severed ties as a result, and supposedly you have to pay for full features? LibreOffice is completely FOSS. https://dms-solutions.co/blog/dms-solutions-stops-doing-business-with-onlyoffice-due-to-onlyoffice-close-ties-with-russia/
Thank you for that! I was about to install it. Looks like I’m sticking with LibreOffice
Try FreeOffice: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/ I’ve foudn it better than OnlyOffice and it is German vs Russian… so there’s that in favour of FreeOffice.
I had no idea…thank you for this.
I saw this about libre if that helps https://youtu.be/4qWgrGc4g20
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/4qWgrGc4g20
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I’m currently using Libre Office and It honestly covers the full gamut for me. I haven’t once felt “man, where’s that option”.
It’s really solid and come a long way since I first used it !
Any limitations in excel?
FreeOffice - It’s not open source but it’s the best offline doc system I’ve found. It’s essentially equal to Microsoft Office and well worth it.
LibreOffice - If open source is really important to you then this is still the go-to office suite. OpenOffice still exists but it’s owned by Apache and fairly behind LibreOffice because it wasn’t made a priority when Oracle gave it up.
Google Docs/Sheets/Draw - This is essentially the best and most professional solution. It’s not open source, you don’t have any control over it, it’s Google but thousands of companies use it daily without flaws. I use it at work and makes sense to use it if you are going to be collaborating on documents. If you need to share them then this is the goto office suite.
That said, Microsoft Office is very wine-able from what I found. You absolutely shouldn’t need it but you can do it.
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my exact same thought, lol. nice
Wow, that’s amazing! I assume this doesn’t really count Steam Deck because usually these stats are from website hits and whatnot.
I remember when we were floundering around 0.50-0.75% or so and 1% seemed unlikely. And now we’re where macOS was some time ago. That’s pretty awesome!
If this is from website hits, then people like me are going to be unintentionally skewing things in Windows’s favor, as my browser always fingerprints as running on Windows.
Yup, and I’m guessing part of what’s causing the shift is people no longer needing to do that. Netflix has worked on Linux for years, and very few sites actually care about OS anymore, though many do care about browser (e.g. I often get stupid warnings on Firefox despite sites working fine).
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That’s nice. Hopefully it getting more notorious means that HW companies will support it better. But, at the same time, if this is just from the Steam Deck, then, kinda fugged
I dunno, I see the steam deck as a huge win for Linux. It shows people how simple Linux gaming can be.
The Steam Deck has shown the impact of a successful Linux-based product launch.
I wish Steam OS would finally launch and help take Linux up to the next 1%.
All thanks to Valve. They did really great job for gaming on Linux.
It is a win, but it’s more of a Steam Deck win than a plain Linux one.
Proton?
Valve puming money in the Steamdeck is paying off for everybody gaming on Linux.
It made me pull the trigger again and this time i’m not even dual booting.
and this time i’m not even dual booting.
I’m so close to doing the same thing. We’re at the point where proton compatibility is good enough that most of the games in my library work. And even if a game truly doesn’t work on Linux at all, I just talk myself out of buying it anyway.
I think I pretty much only boot up Windows once every few weeks to keep it updated.
I don’t need to dual boot because the stuff I play just works on proton or is “native” (minecraft)
Well, sure, proton is great, but I wish HW support was better more than I like proton.
Proton?
Valve puming money in the Steamdeck is paying off for everybody gaming on Linux.
It’s a double-edged sword though. It means there’s no point in developing native Linux games, because it’ll run through Proton anyway. Keeping Windows the default gaming platform still, and making Steam the only way to acquire games if you wanna play on Linux. You CAN add non-steam games to Steam, but they’re not guaranteed to work. I don’t know if you can also run Proton without Steam because I’ve never needed to try, but that would be a hassle for your average user.
There was never a chance in hell that AAA games are natively coming to Linux. I rather have them now with a compatibility layer and gain some market space, we’ll go from there then
Not at the current market share, sure, but Microsoft is doing a lot to alienate people with new restrictions slowly being built in. Vulkan being good helps too, but now thanks to proton there’s no need to move from d3d12 to Vulkan, which is kinda sad.
But if some gaming peripheral maker wants to advertise Steam Deck support they will essentially have to support Linux at least!
From a financial perspective, a 3% market share is so insignificant that companies might not even be aware of what the hell Linux is
Baby steps. Considering that Linux isn’t installed by default on PCs you buy from BestBuy/Walmart, 3% is a good number.
Considering that Linux isn’t installed by default
ahh, I just rememered well dell used to have pre-installed Linux laptops but yeah I see your point
I just rememered well dell used to have pre-installed Linux laptops
Unfortunately, No employee will ever recommend a Linux laptop/PC to a newcomer.
While Linux laptops (Purism/Pop!_OS) are already out there in the market for a few years, people who buy them are already inside the Linux ecosystem.
Unless they came with Wine, and the apps the avg joe just work with wine, I don’t think it’d be a good thing. Hell, could you stop the employees at the store from telling people to just install windows after buying the laptop or the avg joe just doing that?
I just hope Thinkpad become cheaper and It got betrer support than ever 😂
I don’t know. I myself am planning to get a new laptop next year and I’m in a dilemma between an expensive macbook pro or an expensive thinkpad x1 yoga. Similarly priced.
If you care about battery, well you need to consider macbook, they have better battery management, just I don’t know how it’s under linux. 2nd if it’s design, go twith macbook. If it’s not then always go with Thinkpad.
I have a Z13 with AMD (not Intel) & after a year of heavy use exclusively on Linux, I still regularly get 5–11 hours battery and sleep/hibernate works fine. There’s not too many situations where I wouldn’t have an opportunity to charge in there. Previous Intel laptops (even Evo) could barely get 6 & I’d need to carry a power brick to a café if I needed to compile like anything.
So AMD is better on battery nowdays? Seems I need to save up and try one with fedora.
Thanks for sharing!
I wish I could love AMD, but after being hit by the drm/amd#1455 bug, I can’t ever. I’m quite happy with intel and my battery life is the same as when I used windows, so all is fine.
I care about both design and battery, but I’m willing to compromise on battery because I’ll still depend on x86 for games and some other stuff I believe. I like the design of the thinkpads too, black + red is a very kino combo.
At this point it’s also a question of operating system, because Asahi Linux is not ready for general usage, so to get a good experience on an Apple Silicon Macbook you need to be running MacOS still. The performance and battery life will blow the X1 Yoga out of the water I believe, and the Mac build quality is superb, but until Asahi gets better, you’ll be a bit restricted.
Good news is, the drivers from Asahi are also slowly making their way upstream I believe, so in the future, other distros can be run on Mac hardware too.
I don’t plan on running Asahi ever. One of the big reasons I would want a mac is because I wanna try MacOS for myself. Also, I want a thinkpad with an intel meteor lake soc, which will be a radical upgrade. I’m quite hyped
I wonder what the big drop in Windows and big rise in Unknown for awhile was
That can sometimes be ad/tracker blockers, where maybe they know they got a hit but not from where
This is satisfying great news!
does this count things such as steamOS & ChromeOS?
Counts ChromeOS as a different OS.
When Linux gaming reaches 100 percent parity with windows, I’ll probably switch. Until then I can’t really justify it for my home PC. Give it 5 years or so, I’ve heard good things about… proton, i think it was called?
That is quite the criteria. Windows doesn’t have 100% parity with Windows. ;)
As amazing as proton is, Linux will never have 100% parity with Windows because developers and studios can block it. Honestly most games that don’t run right now are intentionally blocked or restricted. If you are interested on what its like though I would strongly encourage throwing Linux on a spare drive or partition and installing steam.
I switched recently to Linux and haven’t had issues with the vast majority of my games. Though, I don’t play many competitive multi-player games. Those seem to be where the issues remain.
It won’t ever. It’s been very close for the last 10 years. It won’t ever be 100%.
A great example right now is “How do you see what driver your device is using?”
In Windows that’s going to device manager -> display adapters -> your device-> properties. Easy and can be easily discovered by thinking “I need to know what driver is running what device” and then going to look for a device manager, and following the trail.
In Linux that’s potentially lspci or lsusb or lshw or a combination of each with their own arguments. Linux fails almost instantly because you have to type a command. Windows treat the user with respect for their time and don’t tell you to stare at a man page for 10 minutes trying to figure out the exact arbitrary letters to add as arguments to some archaic command.
This is been a problem for decades. There are third-party GUIs that don’t tell you the driver being used or tie things together like they show the device but not the driver or not allowing you to manage the driver and aren’t included with most distros, so aren’t discoverable.
Waiting for Linux is a fool’s errand at this point.
TBH, in older versions of Windows, it wasn’t easy either, and required installing the GUI tools from NVIDIA or ATI. And even then it wasn’t intuitive.
As SteamOS and clones evolve and improve, the UX will hopefully follow and become easier to configure and manage.
Device manager has existed since at least Windows 98, maybe in 95. The GUI for the device manager still allowed you to update, identify, and uninstall drivers. It’s been a standard in Windows for decades to manage drivers there but you could also install the specific GPU driver applications from the manufacturer but wasn’t strictly required. Now since Windows 10, Windows just ships with a few GPU drivers and uses the one it detects on boot until it can run Windows Update and grab the latest.
But overall, I was talking about any device driver. Not just GPUs.
Windows treat the user with respect for their time and don’t tell you to stare at a man page for 10 minutes
When I run across Error 0x0000011b or whatever, and there’s no official documentation on it, it doesn’t feel much like respect for my time at all. I’d sooner stare at a man page for 10 minutes than dig through every Microsoft support forum post and try every weird arcane fix.
Yeah there’s 3% reported, but what do you think that 3% unknown is? Am I supposed to believe it’s all Windows users spoofing their user agent?
I spoof my user agent on Linux and appears as a Windows user to websites. So I’m actually contributing to the Windows stat.
It’d be cool to spoof a browser to appear as OS/2 running IE6 or so.
That would be cool but also will defeat the purpose of not standing out
@StarkillerX42 @settinmoon why tf lol
Some websites don’t work without spoofing as windows
i guess privacy
To reduce fingerprinting. Linux still has a relatively small user base.
some men just want to watch the world burn
No most likely Linux users too. BDS and others
