this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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I feel good about cancelling my 365 subscription, and I will continue to feel good about switching to Linux when windows 10 hits end of life. Not giving this company another dime.
I know this is unsolicited advice, so feel free to ignore me, but I am an expert on these things so here's my take:
Before you switch to Linux, start switching your apps to ones that you know will work on Linux. It'll make the process much easier for ya! :-)
For sure. Linux has a lot of great apps but there are times where it'll become incredibly frustrating. For example, file explorers can be basic & frustrating... The best you'll prob get is Dolphin.
Linux has the best file manager I've found on any platform: Krusader. It has twin panels, and a lot of the functionality is bound to FKeys: F2 Rename, F3 View, F4 Edit, F5 Copy, etc. F9 will open a terminal in the current directory. You can edit text files and uncompress zipped files from within Krusader. I've even done it on a remote filesystem over SSH.
I tried this, it's nice indeed. The layout will require some getting used to for me, but I like how it lets me add my remote server as sftp bookmark and open files from there pretty seamlessly, even videos.
I'm have to give this a look!
Isn't Windows File Explorer considered basic? It only just got tabs in 11 right? That and clicking on a disconnected network share would cause it to hang for a good few minutes.
It isn't perfect by any means, but compared to Nautilus & many others, it still has a lot of benefits that make things quicker overall.
I've only used Nemo in Linux, but I can't think of anything Windows file explorer can do that it can't.
I still contend that the best file browser ever made is the macOS Finder. When someone makes something that good for Linux, I'll be very happy
What. What?? Finder is the fucking worst. It doesn't have a sensible tree view, does it?
seems sensible to me? its not amazing but i dont mind it ... what doesnt work for you?
Sidebar defaults are bad. There's no home directory. How do you get to your home directory? Cmd+shift+H, but can you get there without that special shortcut? You can't see the file system's structure in Finder. The GUI doesn't have a way to go "up" in the directory structure. I don't think you can do it in the GUI alone.
It won't let you see stuff in like \tmp\ without a fight, too. I don't know how to open stuff in places like that without
cd'ing to the location in the terminal, and doingopen .in the desired directory.The list view is the least bad, but it gets unwieldy if your directories are deeply nested. It's also bad if you started in the middle of the tree and want to go up. Gallery and column view are really bad for anything non trivial.
I often want to see the entire file path, and it really doesn't want to cooperate. If I do find the file I'm looking for, and want the full path, it doesn't want to give it. I don't even know if there is a way to get it. Other than like cmd+clicking -> "new iterm2 tab here" ->
pwd, which is not really that helpful of Finder.Contrast with windows' default explorer. It's not perfect and I think windows11 made it worse, but still. Open it up, there's the "my pc", click through to my user directory, music, some album, then i can click the top thing and get the path. I can also see the whole tree on the left.
Whatever I was using in Mint was similar to windows' Explorer. Had no complaints about it.
You really don't know how to use macOS, lol
Please. Elaborate.
I used treesize once to clean up my computer. That's what a file system should be like.
Genuine question, is this trolling or do you seriously believe this?
Is it that outlandish that someone can appreciate a piece of closed-source software?
Appreciate isn't the claim tho
I've been on Linux as my primary OS for around a year now. I'm still looking for a replacement for Lightroom and camera raw that doesn't absolutely crush any image I'm working on.
Have you tried raw therapee? At least for what I do I find it to be an excellent Lightroom replacement.
ART, a fork of RawTherapee, is also very good.
Terrible name for SEO but sounds cool! 🤪
It sounds like it might be closer to a 1:1 replacement for Lightroom than Raw therapee. (I haven't installed it, I'm just reading the description. https://art.pixls.us/)
I haven't used Lightroom, so I can't comment on how similar they are either. But there are enough good options that hopefully anyone switching can find one that meets their needs. :)
I have, but with terrible results. Can you recommend some tutorials? The behavior of various tools always surprises me, coming from Adobe raw and Lightroom.
For example, reducing contrast in Adobe tones down highlights and shadows while doing that in dark table and rawtherapee turns everything washed out and grey.
Hmm, unfortunately I don't have any good recommendations. I've just tinkered with it until stuff I like happens, and it's been so long since I used Lightroom I can't speak to specific differences.
With the contrast example it sounds like maybe the RT/DT tools are more literal, and Lightroom is more "smart" perhaps? I usually use the curves panel for this sort of thing, like if I want to bring down some highlights, I'll find whereabouts they are on the histogram and target that area specifically. If I want a lower-contrast image in general I may compensate for some dullness with the local contrast and saturation tools, or if it's the common scenario of a washed out sky, I'll probably use a graduated filter to darken the sky without messing with the foreground.
I'm just guessing though, so I don't know if this is helpful at all.
Any information is helpful and I truly appreciate you taking the time to summarize your workflow. I've actually never monitored the histogram outside of snapping the photo, so that alone is a great suggestion. I generally edit by eye and kinda feel my way through, but using a metric sounds like a great idea! It also makes a lot more sense if you're right about RT/DT being more "literal."
I know I haven't given enough time to either piece of software, but I've been so shocked by how little of my process carried over, that I kinda ran away in fear almost immediately.
Well I'm glad that helps! I enjoy this stuff.
The histogram is neat, I used to just look for "lump in the middle = good exposure" but there are so many other way to make use of it.
There's a panel that I think is present by default in RawTherapee, in the upper left corner, that shows a histogram, and when you hover your mouse over your photo, it has a sort of gauge across the bottom that marks where the pixel under your mouse is at. This can be helpful with determining which bit you want to target with adjustments.
There's also a neat way I've found to get the most out of some images...in the curves panel, starting from the bottom/left/black, make the curve climb steeply where the histogram spikes, and then level off a bit (not totally level, but less steep) where the histogram dips. This seems to give more apparent contrast, without pushing the highlights or shadows too far apart. I hope that makes sense. It'll take some trial and error but might give you something like what you were getting in Lightroom, with shadows and highlights both near "correct" exposure, but avoiding washed out and dull.
I've seen people on the internet suggesting Darktable as a solid Lightroom replacement... I don't know anything about photo editing, but am curious - how bad is it?
From darktable's FAQ:
https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/
In my personal experience it's pretty good, but I've never used lightroom nor do I have nearly any idea what I'm doing with RAW processing, or photography in general, but I've been happy with the few photos I've put through it!
Yeah, so here's my general process batch-editing photos in Adobe Camera Raw:
When I'm done, I have a stark, professional looking photo to export. In darktable, trying this leaves me with a grey mess. I've also tried rawtherapee, but with even worse results. I'm 96% sure that the problem is me, though.
Since 2003 here.
Best of luck in that case!
The only hurdle here is design software. I use Affinity mostly and it's great, but they don't have Linux apps. I did manage to get Affinity Designer running with Wine at one point, but it wasn't particularly stable.
I recommend you to do the switch now. Linux is more accessible than ever and there is no reason to give them any more of your data. Also it helps you to transition step by step where it might take a bit longer to get used to a different way of doing things.
I've been considering Linux for a while now, but I play games between 4 and 8 hours pr day. Is Linux and gaming still a problem or?
It depends on the game, although the overall situation has improved recently. Multiplayer games tend to have more issues due to their anti cheat software, which often doesn't support Linux.
I recommend you check these pages for compatibility in your preferred games in case you want to try:
honestly, most of the games i wanna play are totally fine and might run even better on linux. what is something to keep in mind is anti linux anti cheat: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ besides, you can check https://www.protondb.com/ to get a rough overview of what you can play. out of all the games i’m playing only one isn’t working rn, cuz the screen ratio is messed up (it’s a small rather unknown game) but really many games are fine. i use steam and heroic games launcher, and they’re great. f nvidia tho. they can be a true pain in the butt (on windows too though…)
ngl, sometimes it is. it depends on the game. usually the problem is anti-cheat, but Valve has been working on improving that with many games working out of the box today. i’d say if you’re playing single player games, once you get Proton installed it’s virtually the same experience.
check out https://www.protondb.com/
if your games are gold or above on there, i’d go ahead and pull the trigger.
Nope, look into Bazzite for an easy Linux distro to set up
Most Indie games work fine. It is just the AAA crap that somehow can't be bothered to make their stuff work on anything but Windows.
Depends on the game and your hardware. Most games runs just fine under proton. Valve have done a great job there.
Hardware has never been an issue for me but I read here somewhere that they had 10-15% less performance on Linux. ymmw.
Use SteamOS. Your use case requires it.
Does steam os have a regular desktop mode? I saw ETA prime install steamos on a mini gaming pc yesterday, but never mentioned using it with a mouse and keyboard.
Do not get steamos lol.
Any regular desktop distribution is fine (fedora, mint...), if you have new hardware you'll want a recent kernel. Nvidia gpus can be problematic. You can always try the distro before installing.
Depends on the game really but sometimes you have to spend a lot of time & research on things to figure it out. Great that it is open source but companies like Microsoft also work to sabotage efforts at times. If it has multiplayer with anticheat, you'll prob find a lot more instances where things don't work or require more effort.
I actually do have Linux installed on a spare drive. I haven't booted it up for a bit, but I've started getting used to how stuff works. I should boot it up again.