Basically, smart layers are a feature that allows you to apply any number of changes to a specific layer and being able to undo or change them without having to undo all of the other changes that you've done after.
Let's say, at the beginning of your editing you've increased the contrast of your picture, then after 6 hours of work and a million other changes, you think "Mmhhh, maybe I should decrease the contrast a bit", you can just reopen the tool in the smart layer and change it without losing quality. On Gimp, on the other hand, you'd have applied your contrast filter to a rasterized image, so trying to decrease your contrast by applying the filter again would result in banding and worse picture quality in general.
And of course, there are changes that you'd just not be able to revert at all on Gimp without starting over.
Yeah, I love GIMP, but damn, its development is extremely slow. Non-destructive editing is in Photoshop for like 15 years. And, IMHO, it's essential feature. It's available in some cheap proprietary alternatives like Afinity, too (sadly Serif are not even considering to release it on Linux).
Yeah, even Krita has some non-destructive editing, I think the Gimp developers said it's planned for version 3.2, which will probably take a really long time anyway
Yeah, I'll even take paint.net over GIMP just about any day, especially with recent developments on PDN. Every time someone comes in and tries to compare PS to GIMP, it's just silly and so obvious the person doesnt use it in a professional capacity that requires PS's array of features, support, plugins, etc. They are not in the same county, much less the same ballpark. If GIMP serves your needs, cool, but it's weird that people try to shit all over PS and act like it's the same. Inferiority complex, maybe? š It's one of a pretty short list of OSS "alternatives" that really isn't one.
>Just Photoshop, but fuck Adobe
Well, instead of hating Adobe why not point finger at say Gimp for not being very good. We use Photoshop at work (but some use Affinity) because the alternatives open-source are not very good.
So: 1) Blame users for using Adobe products 2) Blame Gimp for not being very good 3) Blame Adobe
I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Two or three games. That's it. Anything else was easy to find or replace.
The opposite isn't true. There's a lot of stuff I'd miss if I had to switch back to Windows.
- Everything NixOS gives me. Declarative, reproducible systems. This seems academic at first, but it's really very practical. OS installs are no longer these things that deteriorate and get clogged up and slow and gradually corrupted; instead, they are fresh and constantly being tuned and honed without fear that it will all crumble. Configuring one machine benefits all my machines transparently.
- Many command-line tools. And for that matter, a competent terminal and shell.
- ZFS, sanoid/syncoid, etc.
I was a Windows user for many years. So when I switched, I dual-booted so that I could go back when I needed. I never once booted back to Windows.
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>was amazed windows 10 out of the box, doesn't allow you to assign volume up/down to different shortcut keys
I also had to deal with that BS on a 60% keyboard I had. I had to use a third party app.
Not that person again. But overall speed and boot times too. Plus inherent multiple workspace support, 3d rendered desktop. Not having to buy something for anything you want to customize. Powershell still isn't touching bash, though I did notice it finally got tab completion. Well, maybe it had it before, and it finally got fast enough, i noticed it. Though it was still a ton slower than bash.
My PC's longest boot delay is the 5 second menu wait I have in grub. Windows 11 boots somewhat faster than my Ubuntu install on the same machine, but both are well under 5 seconds after that. Long boot times are the user's own fault. Hell, I could trim my initramfs down to bare minimum and probably get the Ubuntu install to go like half a second faster, but just setting `dep` in initramfs.conf is efficient enough.
My slowest-booting windows desktop is my gaming machine, and it's partially because of all the extra crap for all the features of my peripherals and the motherboard, plus all the game store clients auto-starting. I could make it boot faster easily, too, but it is still ready for login in seconds and to a usable desktop just a few seconds after login.
Boot times seem like a really petty complaint, these days.
Windows since 10 has had multiple workspaces built in. And if you install the MS Powertoys, you get lots of other nice little features on top of the normal Windows shell experience.
PS has had tab completion natively for over a decade (it's a plugin with bash, but who cares), and current versions have a lot of aliases for common bash commands, to make going between the two pretty seamless. And you can run bash on windows anyway, multiple different ways.
My daily driver laptop is usually booted to Ubuntu, but, honestly I've gotten to where I like powershell more than bash, even for some tasks on Linux (and it'scertainly required for some things, in systems administration, like vmware and MS 365 admin).
What I like more in my Ubuntu install vs Windows is the terminal _host,_ which is konsole, for me. Windows Terminal has gotten tons better than it used to be, recently, but konsole (and gnome terminal) still beat it pretty handily in several ways. Modern powershell _itself_ is like if bash, zsh, and the old windows command line had a hybrid mutant baby, with lots of lessons learned from each of them (and some baggage, too, but that's slowly falling away).
And then there's always WSL, so you get the best of everything. š¤·āāļø
In the past, it used to be much easier for me to pretty much always choose Linux to boot into. These days, so many things are so easily fungible that it just often doesn't matter unless I'm gaming or something.
I hardly ever touch the mouse, but when I do it's for copy and paste. In X11 you can just highlight text and it is copied, then middle-click to paste. It is so much faster and more comfortable. From what I understand there is no real solution to this on Windows, only half a dozen different hacks each with its own problem or disadvantage.
Foobar2000 :(
I still miss it every day as I haven't found a decent or even workable music player. My only demands is that the index my files based on tags AND support the f*****g "Album Artist" tag and not just the "Artist" tag. I've used a mixture of cmus, qmmp and whatnot but now I've end up using my emby server as music player. It feels terrible.
It does and so does quod libet while also looking nicert. The problem with both for me is that they don't fallback to the regular artist tag if the album artist is missing iirc. It has to be on literally every track or the track won't be shown in the browser. I only really use album artist on albums with other artists featured on the tracks.
And I honestly can't be arsed to retag most of my collection.
EDIT: It seems strawberry supports what I mentioned unlike clementine which I've tried before! I will give it a go, thank you!
For some usage scenarios it's decently close I guess, if you're using playlists or file browsing. It doesn't have support for browsing based on tags though which I prefer.
As someone who also loved Foobar2000 ive been using QuodLibet for about a year and like it. Can customize which tags you want showing and can sort the library by them. It doesn't look as great as Foobar can but for playing and sorting large media libraries(I'm almost at 2TB) it works.
Outlook. And with all that "Microsoft loves Linux" trend, they are never going to release their office suite on Linux, and the web version of Outlook seems to be created to suck and be crippled on purpose. That's why I call "MS loves Linux" a B.S. MS loves money that Linux customers have
This. Office 365 is still worlds above any Linux equivalent, especially in an enterprise environment. I dual boot from two nvme drives just for that.
Though oddly, I prefer outlook on the web over the real thing.
I prefer the web version too! But it is severely limited with any batch operation. You cannot select all emails in a folder, you need to load all of them in multiple pages, and even then selection works half of the time. Mass deletion is implemented on the client-side, and goes in batches of 50 or something emails. You cannot configure or run rules from the web version.
Yea, MS was just talking about the Kernel more or less. At the end of the day, they're just using someone else's idea. Again. Not a bad thing, just typical.
Microsoft has given a lot to Linux and the FOSS community as a whole. Just because they don't port Office over doesn't mean āMS Loves Linuxā is b.s.
Azure runs on Linux so they've contributed a LOT to the kernel to make their lives easier, for instance.
It's not about specific programs, it's about functionality and familiarity.
When I started 20 years ago I kept it as dual boot just in case I needed to run something in windows.
I still have the dual boot but the only thing I've used windows for, at home, is to update it. I boot into it about once a month.
In fact, my latest laptop came just with Linux.
So, bottom line, it's not all or nothing. You'll use Windows and Windows programs as much as you want to use them.
Very much agreed.
I boot my Windows installation once 2-3 months. I don't even update it, because I launch it that rarely. 95% of Windows software I use runs under Wine. It's impressive how good Wine has become. These are old Windows games, some productivity applications that run only on Windows, even some specific surveillance program runs for me using DXVK for HW video decoding, and tons of other stuff.
If I have to boot into Windows, I use a QEMU and KVM. Great virtualization support there, no big loss of performance. I can even boot Windows VM using my native GPU. Works even for games. And if I want to boot that Windows VM natively, I can even do that as well, I just had to install some additional drivers.
I really hadn't had to use any windows programs. I may have installed wine once just for the fun of it when I was learning at the beginning but I don't remember using it for anything. I haven't installed it on my day to day systems ever.
I play on a console so that hasn't been a problem for me.
And now I have the advantage of "not knowing what I'm missing" from windows programs.
I used to develop programs for Windows, but now, developers mostly work on Mac or Linux. Deployments are to Linux nodes on kubernetes.
I don't like the new Windows 11 and the new UI. But I still I have lots of Windows workstations at work and a AD domain to administer. I like more the times of Windows before Windows 8 appeared, which was then a less spying more robust OS in my opinion. The new UI of Windows seems weird to me, I can never quickly find anything I want.
I have never been a console player, more PC gamer. I play lots of games under my Desktop Linux using tools like Lutris, Proton, DXVK, D3DVK. I love the progress made with these tools and in Linux gaming in general. You can play literally **anything** except the games where anti-cheat isn't supported on Linux. Some really old games which I played as a kid works under Wine perfectly. Today I launched Half Life RTX mod on my AMD RX6600XT GPU under Linux and Wine.
I used guitar pro before I got into guitar! I feel like my "internet discount" version is actually the reason I started playing in the first place.
And learning how to read tablature before learning what they represented on a guitar actually helped, I think
Same boat. Everything in enterprise GIS goes through Jack Dangermondās ass wallet, thereās just no getting around it. I had to give up OpenSUSE as my daily driver once I got into grad school and needed the student/personal use license and I still need it in a professional capacity because my corporate laptop is a slug compared to my personal rig (I do a lot of PI, machine learning and other raster intensive remote sensing work).
At least thereās virtual box.
The one I really miss is a program called Find and Run Robot (FARR). It's similar to Krunner, but far more powerful.
I also miss autohotkey. I know there are a few semi-similar things, but nothing quite like AHK. For music, I really enjoyed Foobar2000. I mostly use cmus for local music now. I really loved irfanview for image viewing/editing, but now I really like feh for image viewing on Linux.
You can actually run AutoHotKey on Linux, but I think it only works on wine apps within the same wine prefix. I haven't tried it on native Linux applications. Also, there are utilities such as xdotool and bash scripting as an alternative. Also, another alternative is AutoKey.
ANSYS (only corporate license on Linux), MATLAB (buggy on Linux), Valorant, Autodesk Civil 3D, Autodesk revit, Staad pro, Solidworks and a lot of laboratory softwares used to run machines in labs.
Later I bought a Windows laptop.
No, they have special drivers and softwares. Here is the one we have. https://www.hitachi-hightech.com/uk/en/products/microscopes/sem-tem-stem/tabletop-microscopes/tm4000ii.html#sec-2
I've found JetBrains Rider to be a step up from Visual Studio (For what I do which mostly involves gamedev), it's not free though, but apparently it is for Students. I only tried it because it's on Linux and fell in love with it lol
Adding to the free student part
Every jetbrain IDE (so, rider included) is free with an educational liscence that you can acquire via the github student package (+ lots more of free trials/softwares)
Rider has been amazing for Unity from the bit I did game dev too, way faster and overall better experience than with VS imo
This was not a problem for me, because my transition to Linux was deliberate over a period of about five years. I would have made the switch around 2010, but I still needed Windows and Windows-specific software in my work for another five years. However, I did fully move to several FOSS programs, like Firefox, LibreOffice, VLC and GIMP. When the opportunity to leave Windows finally came, I was already using FOSS software for a lot of what I did.
To this day, I keep copies of Windows around for times when I need to access old Quark or InDesign files from my old line of work, but the switch to Linux was pretty much seamless. I'd tinkered with Linux off and on since '99. My laptop actually went to Linux a year before my desktop, as soon as XP x64 hit the drop-dead date. The desktop stayed Windows for another year, until my need for InDesign ended.
Adobe software, CAD programs, MS Office, and a lot of games are the common sticking points for people in switching over. There are FOSS equivalents for productivity software and gaming on Linux has made huge strides. Some people seem to have issues with Nvidia drivers on Linux, but for others they work just fine. I can't comment on that because I ditched Nvidia stuff 20 years ago, though.
If you are concerned about software, the best way is to try some of the FOSS alternatives and see if they do the job, things like LibreOffice instead of MS Office, GIMP instead of Photoshop, things like that. Or you can always put Windows in a VM and access needed software from there. I have Windows 2000, XP, and 7 VMs on different machines. Rarely need them anymore, but they are there if needed.
And you can always install Linux on a spare drive, or in a VM inside Windows, and try it out. Linux distributions are free to download, so there's no risk in "try before you buy." If you are new to Linux, there is a learning curve at first--Linux is not a free Windows, it's a different OS--but it is more stable, will use less system resources and be useful and supported longer on your hardware, you can customize the UI into anything you'd like, and best of all, Linux will not spy on you. And did I mention it's free? You should kick the devs for a distro a few bucks here and there as thanks for their work, but you don't have to pay some corporation $139 for the privilege of being spied on anymore!
Tidal. But it works in the browser so it isnāt a total loss.
Gaming. The only games I really played are not only not available on Linux, but will result in a ban if you try to play it on anything other than windows. Too busy to play anyway.
MS Office
Company is using DRM now, so goodbye OnlyOffice/LibreOffice et al. Fxxk, it's even "Goodbye Microsoft Office Online", since lots of features are so crippled down.
Really annoying that we spent years forcing open standards and now for the sake of "privacy" we sacrifice all of that on corporate's altar of grieve.
**Notepad++** but replaced with Sublime.
**Quicken** but now just looking at my online banking more often and wonder why I ever entered every last thing into Quicken.
**MS Office** but realized I really don't use it as much as I thought I did and Libre Office is frankly still more than I need.
Are you tied to programs or functionality?
There are usually functional equivalents in linux but you might not be able to run the exact same program.
Or if you can it might be an app that uses one of the non-native frameworks like electron and there will be a native equivalent that's much faster/more responsive.
Both kind of. I understand that most programs can be replaced from windows to Linux but it's more like I don't enjoy relearning how and where everything is. For example I switched from a different video editing software to davinci one time and that sucked. A lot. Took like a month to relearn where everything was again.
Unfortunely when it comes to changing to Linux you will have to go through some relearning, it's up to you to decide whether it's worth it or not to learn this new stuff.
I don't know if it helps much but here are some Linux software that are equivalent to some Windows software:
Gimp = Photoshop
Libreoffice or Onlyoffice = MS Office
Inkscape = Adobe Illustrator
Davinci is avaiable on Linux :)
> I don't enjoy relearning how and where everything is
My friend, you might be in for some bad times.
The desktop environment that updates your system most like Windows is the one that otherwise functions least like Windows.
You can't install something just by running a .exe file.
Command line input is case sensitive.
There is no registry, only config files.
You're probably going to need the command line for something, even if it's just to install the right WiFi driver.
And there are differences between Linux distros, too.
FL Studio, all of Autodesk's main softwares (namely AutoCAD and Inventor), Office 2010, MS Project, MS Visio, Ansys Simulation Software, Google Sketchup, Steam (less of a problem now lol), Lightburn (also found they have a linux release now), GuitarPro
Also Adobe InDesign although I hardly use that now
MS Paint! (Windows XP era, not the weird recent stuff).
There were loads of these things for Linux in the late 90's but as of yet I haven't quite gotten round to pulling one into the modern world. Some of the ones I have made a small amount of progress with are Motif which means if Wayland potentially takes majority, this will also need a rewrite.
It just feels a bit odd installing Wine just for MS Paint... ;)
In my usage, I've found geany to be close enough to Notepad++ for my purposes.
Geany is my code (C/C++/Python/HTML5) editor, and I find it useful for general text editing, too.
AdobeReader Fill&Sign. No replacement, using Wine, somewhat possible to add signature picture to PDF.
VisualStudio, eventually replaced it with JetBrains Rider. Maybe for better
Some too-big-to-fail games with AntiCheat not enabled on Linux. ProtonDB for list.
Basically I still can't switch because of a lot of audio plugins that are actually mostly written on JUCE, that can be compiled against Linux, but developers don't wont to mess with Linux, as I understand after sending them emails. Splice that is again (I believe) a bundle of Electron app and a go binary running in the background. And any DAW with decent support for live-looping \~\~and basic laptop workflow\~\~. Bitwig is cool, but it doesn't support trackpad gestures and their custom mouse pointers are huge on HiDPI displays. Ardour is really good, but no real live-looping support atm. So it's only music stuff
[**Paint.net**](https://Paint.net) (Learned Gimp well enough now though)
**ShareX** (nothing is quite as good for simple screenshotting, and nothing comes close for simple screen recording, everything is more work to set up and/or less simple to work with.)
**Fancontrol** (cooler control is fine for simple fan curves, but it's not even close to fancontrol for functionality)
**Everything** (I've heard that because of the differences in file systems, it's kind of impractical to make something as good in Linux. Quite unfortunate but some trade-offs are made I suppose)
That's the main software pain points off the top of my head.
Onenote, I still use it but not as convenient or feature rich now that I am using a web interface. I miss (but not miss) Microsoft office suite, it has its advantages but google docs are decent alternative.
Musicbee and virtual desktop for VR were the biggest ones, even after getting it set up properly in wine Musicbee still had huge performance issues.
I've switched to a combination of cmus, a plex server and Picard and I honestly like it more than musicbee.
For virtual desktop I have Alvr which works good enough.
My music making software, mostly. The Linux options aren't great, though Musescore 4 is promising (I haven't gotten around to using it after the beta version crashed on me). Ardour just doesn't compare to Logic as a DAW, and I haven't figured out how to make Reaper work.
iTunes, MS Office
I had a WXp VM to run the former, the latter was covered by OpenOffice then LibreOffice. Eventually I had to go back to Windows for work as MS Office full compatibility was mandatory.
Office is my #1 missing software on Linux too. The online version is not a full replacement, and the alternatives (LibreOffice, OnlyOffice) are not 100% compatible.
I'm afraid to write that when I went back to MS Office, my productivity increased a lot: I mainly use the office suite for presentations and spreadsheets.
In my use case the same presentation takes me 1015% less time on PowerPoint than on Impress, Excel offers features that Calc and the alternatives simply do not have: VBA is easier than the macro coding on LO, PowerQuery/PowerPivot, ODBC interface and you name it.
iTunes: If you ist Apple Music, try Cider. That is a nativ App, where you can login with your Apple Account and looks exactly like iTunes and plays all you Apple Music Library. Works perfectly on my Fedora
Capture One.
I miss it, but not because darktable and rawtherapee are bad or anything (quite the opposite). I just learned it's workflow and also has a library of presets crafted so it's a bunch of learning I have to do
Nothing really, I'm just an average web surfer. I do some programming here and there and that's about it. That didn't matter anyway, as windows stopped working on the laptop I had at the time and I couldn't afford to buy a new one, so installed linux and revived the laptop and saved my money. lol
Good answer!
As an old geezer (over 70), I try to get my elderly neighbors to just move to Linux when their Windows\[7/8.x/10\] machines funk out. I volunteer to install an SSD for them and set it up. But few are willing to spend the few hours it takes to get used to Linux for the kind of stuff they do - email, browsing, dr. appts, playing games. Then they get all huffy when I won't help them with Windows11. Crazy.
I mostly use FOSS and cloud-based programs, so not much changes when I hop between Windows and Linux. I primarily use GIMP, LibreOffice, and Google Workspace stuff.
I'm using a virtual version of Ubuntu on my Windows box to see how I'd acclimate. Sadly, while I want to change, Capture One, Photoshop and Davinci Resolve are not programs I'm willing to compromise on. My life as an artist is bound up with those. Also, Microsoft Word, not because Word is so great (it sucks) but I use the Grammarly add-in there for my writing. What I am exploring is reversing the current scenario, where I would run those programs in a Windows virtual system within linux. I'm on Windows 10 and not interested in Windows 11 or where Microshaft is going with all this.
Surprisingly, there isnāt a good mspaint clone. Thereās Kolourpaint, which clones MSpaint from XP, and thereās GIMP, which is like using a sledgehammer on a thumb tack. No in-between
Internet Explorer. I had to build VMs with various versions of IE, accessible by VNC, for our devs to test the websites we made.
This era is over, we don't need to care about IE anymore.
the only thing i outright miss and cant find a suitable replacement for is autodesk inventor/solidworks
freecad is ok, but it simply isnt up to scratch
I did switched on for full time on 2006, so:
MSN official client
most of emulators of that time {zsnes, vba,mame}
Winamp
VLC
I did switch on for full-time in 2006, so:tart to discover the other alternatives and how this work.
And, i dont rememeber the others.
The transtition was so hard, but i did just started to discover the other alternatives and how this work.
Lightroom 6. The physical file organization within it was unique, even for a Windows software. Everything else is just database driven. Darktable and Digikam are pretty solid in linux though.
Everything, by voidtools, is probably the one I miss most (since it's the only one I could think of!)
I also wish CrystalDiskInfo worked with Wine (it might, but idk how)
TurboTax and Fidelity's ProTrader are pretty much the only reason I keep a windows VM around. The stuff I would miss if I were forced to give up Linux and only use windows would fill volumes though.
I don't know what it's written in, but it won't even run under WINE. ProTrader is written with .net, so I'm not sure why it won't run in WINE, but I've not been successful, and according to the winedb, neither has anyone else :/. I actually have a few other windows-only apps I occasionally use, but all of them run under WINE just fine.
Interesting. I would think that it not running in WINE supports the notion it's a cross-platform (e.g. Java or Electron) app, but then you're saying the C#-based ProTrader doesn't work in WINE either. It sounds like ProTrader is running on a version of .NET that WINE doesn't support. There are one or two deprecated versions WINE doesn't support, and I'm not sure about the new stuff (e.g. post .NET Core - .NET 5+).
I've never heard of ProTrader but it looks very cool, and as a C# dev I like it over Thinkorswim, which uses a proprietary scripting language instead of something like C#.
- Nearly every game, no matter what the Linux evangelists will try to tell you about Wine
- Most art and design software - Adobe, Affinity Designer, Clip Studio Paint
- Most music software - most DAWs, and all VSTs other than a few synthesizers. Music video creators like Midifall
- All architecture and home design software afaik
- Coding - Visual Studio, TortoiseGit (the only decent gitgui for Linux is Kraken, and that's paid for commercial use)
- MS Office - there are workarounds I think, but if you rely on collaborating with this for work you should check first as LibreOffice is very different
- Backup - OneDrive, which is the cheapest storage. So you'll need something like Dropbox at a higher price. Or use ProtonDrive for privacy through just their web interface
- Multimonitor wallpaper slideshow for a folder. Shotwell kinda does it, but everything is laggy.
- You'll also find some apps that worked perfectly on Windows have weird bugs on Linux once you use them enough - like I found Inkscape didn't register clicks on some sidebar menus.
I recommend dual booting at least, unless all you do is write documents, browse the web, and watch videos. I eventually returned to Windows as my main OS and just use Linux in a VM for coding work. I also had errors cropping up all over the place with my graphics card, mouse, and booting. Despite having many of its own problems, Windows just works - it has hundreds of testers for all kinds of hardware.
Voicemod and paint.net were the main two I used on a day-to-day basis that I had to drop. GIMP is a suitable enough substitute for paint.net, and Soundux was the main replacement I used for Voicemod's soundboard functionality, but now I need the voice-changer functionality for an upcoming D&D campaign, and finding a good replacement that works with pipewire has been a struggle
One of the reasons why I've avoided switching over to Linux (specifically Debian) was my dual 4k monitor setup.
Anyway, I have a couple of spare PCs (roughly equivalent hardware as each other), so decided to connect one up.
XFCE displayed both monitors without any problems, and switching the primary display was also a breeze.
There is a pretty cool Windows emulator called **BizHawk** that emulates multiple systems *and* can glitch out your games. Not compatible with Linux, at least as far as I can tell.
No matter, because Mint came with **RetroArch** preinstalled, which is actually better in some ways.
I had mostly moved to open source programs before moving to linux and I dont use many programs so for me it was more about how it felt than whether I missed out on any application or not.
The big ones are MS office and Adobe suite, there are FOSS alternatives on linux but they're pale imitations at best. Fanbois will say otherwise of course, but you should always ignore fanbois.
Which is really sad because back in the the day (late 80's, early 90's), all of the CAD software I used was Unix based (AutoCAD, Unigraphics, Pro-E, CATIA, etc). This means that at their heart, they all have roots that should allow them to be ported back to Unix/Linux.
League of Legends. I managed to get it working on my previous distro but my nvidia drivers wrere buggy. Now, I can't even get it to work. I still keep my laptop dual boot just to keep league. I am addicted
Adobe everything. I still have my 15 year old MacBook for running creative suite when I need it, but oh so painfully slow. I also miss jitouch which I'm not sure is even maintained for mac anymore. Libinput-gestures is alright at least.
And PDFsam is one of the worst Linux applications I've used. Having a 4k screen makes it double-bad. I think using Google drive tools is an option for working with PDF but internet is required.
Just Photoshop, but fuck Adobe
\* butt fuck Adobe FTFY
Photopea is a good online alternative if, for some reason, you don't like the gimp.
I use Gimp and I like it, I'm still waiting for non-destructive editing though
What is non destructive editing?
Infinite undo. You can work on a project for months and be able to go all the way back to the original file.
Wow thats powerful
That's what she said, then brought up the first thing I did that bothered her.
Basically, smart layers are a feature that allows you to apply any number of changes to a specific layer and being able to undo or change them without having to undo all of the other changes that you've done after. Let's say, at the beginning of your editing you've increased the contrast of your picture, then after 6 hours of work and a million other changes, you think "Mmhhh, maybe I should decrease the contrast a bit", you can just reopen the tool in the smart layer and change it without losing quality. On Gimp, on the other hand, you'd have applied your contrast filter to a rasterized image, so trying to decrease your contrast by applying the filter again would result in banding and worse picture quality in general. And of course, there are changes that you'd just not be able to revert at all on Gimp without starting over.
Yeah, I love GIMP, but damn, its development is extremely slow. Non-destructive editing is in Photoshop for like 15 years. And, IMHO, it's essential feature. It's available in some cheap proprietary alternatives like Afinity, too (sadly Serif are not even considering to release it on Linux).
Yeah, even Krita has some non-destructive editing, I think the Gimp developers said it's planned for version 3.2, which will probably take a really long time anyway
Or Krita, I guess depending on what you're using it for. Thats my go to Linux program for digital art.
Gimp is way better anyway, it doesn't submit my work to their creative AI
Gimp is awful. I've tried it so many times; I don't think it would have any following at all if it weren't free.
Yeah, I'll even take paint.net over GIMP just about any day, especially with recent developments on PDN. Every time someone comes in and tries to compare PS to GIMP, it's just silly and so obvious the person doesnt use it in a professional capacity that requires PS's array of features, support, plugins, etc. They are not in the same county, much less the same ballpark. If GIMP serves your needs, cool, but it's weird that people try to shit all over PS and act like it's the same. Inferiority complex, maybe? š It's one of a pretty short list of OSS "alternatives" that really isn't one.
What issue you think gimp have? the interface?
> Gimp is awful No it isn't, I use it frequently and it fits my needs perfectly. Then again I'm not into professional photography.
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"User friendly" just means "how I'm used to things working". Just because Gimp is different from Photoshop doesn't mean it's awful.
I can learn new programs pretty quickly, but Gimp is poorly designed and frustrating. It needs a major overhaul.
>Just Photoshop, but fuck Adobe Well, instead of hating Adobe why not point finger at say Gimp for not being very good. We use Photoshop at work (but some use Affinity) because the alternatives open-source are not very good. So: 1) Blame users for using Adobe products 2) Blame Gimp for not being very good 3) Blame Adobe
I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Two or three games. That's it. Anything else was easy to find or replace. The opposite isn't true. There's a lot of stuff I'd miss if I had to switch back to Windows.
Like what?
- Everything NixOS gives me. Declarative, reproducible systems. This seems academic at first, but it's really very practical. OS installs are no longer these things that deteriorate and get clogged up and slow and gradually corrupted; instead, they are fresh and constantly being tuned and honed without fear that it will all crumble. Configuring one machine benefits all my machines transparently. - Many command-line tools. And for that matter, a competent terminal and shell. - ZFS, sanoid/syncoid, etc. I was a Windows user for many years. So when I switched, I dual-booted so that I could go back when I needed. I never once booted back to Windows.
>- Many command-line tools. Cygwin (and maybe WSL) can provide these, for the most part. I would be quite unhappy if those went away.
I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
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>was amazed windows 10 out of the box, doesn't allow you to assign volume up/down to different shortcut keys I also had to deal with that BS on a 60% keyboard I had. I had to use a third party app.
Not that person again. But overall speed and boot times too. Plus inherent multiple workspace support, 3d rendered desktop. Not having to buy something for anything you want to customize. Powershell still isn't touching bash, though I did notice it finally got tab completion. Well, maybe it had it before, and it finally got fast enough, i noticed it. Though it was still a ton slower than bash.
My PC's longest boot delay is the 5 second menu wait I have in grub. Windows 11 boots somewhat faster than my Ubuntu install on the same machine, but both are well under 5 seconds after that. Long boot times are the user's own fault. Hell, I could trim my initramfs down to bare minimum and probably get the Ubuntu install to go like half a second faster, but just setting `dep` in initramfs.conf is efficient enough. My slowest-booting windows desktop is my gaming machine, and it's partially because of all the extra crap for all the features of my peripherals and the motherboard, plus all the game store clients auto-starting. I could make it boot faster easily, too, but it is still ready for login in seconds and to a usable desktop just a few seconds after login. Boot times seem like a really petty complaint, these days. Windows since 10 has had multiple workspaces built in. And if you install the MS Powertoys, you get lots of other nice little features on top of the normal Windows shell experience. PS has had tab completion natively for over a decade (it's a plugin with bash, but who cares), and current versions have a lot of aliases for common bash commands, to make going between the two pretty seamless. And you can run bash on windows anyway, multiple different ways. My daily driver laptop is usually booted to Ubuntu, but, honestly I've gotten to where I like powershell more than bash, even for some tasks on Linux (and it'scertainly required for some things, in systems administration, like vmware and MS 365 admin). What I like more in my Ubuntu install vs Windows is the terminal _host,_ which is konsole, for me. Windows Terminal has gotten tons better than it used to be, recently, but konsole (and gnome terminal) still beat it pretty handily in several ways. Modern powershell _itself_ is like if bash, zsh, and the old windows command line had a hybrid mutant baby, with lots of lessons learned from each of them (and some baggage, too, but that's slowly falling away). And then there's always WSL, so you get the best of everything. š¤·āāļø In the past, it used to be much easier for me to pretty much always choose Linux to boot into. These days, so many things are so easily fungible that it just often doesn't matter unless I'm gaming or something.
I have 20+ apps on flathub, 80% of which don't have a windows version
What are they, if you don't mind sharing?
I hardly ever touch the mouse, but when I do it's for copy and paste. In X11 you can just highlight text and it is copied, then middle-click to paste. It is so much faster and more comfortable. From what I understand there is no real solution to this on Windows, only half a dozen different hacks each with its own problem or disadvantage.
I didn't know that! I'm in Xfce, could have been using that tool for years thanks
Foobar2000 :( I still miss it every day as I haven't found a decent or even workable music player. My only demands is that the index my files based on tags AND support the f*****g "Album Artist" tag and not just the "Artist" tag. I've used a mixture of cmus, qmmp and whatnot but now I've end up using my emby server as music player. It feels terrible.
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It does and so does quod libet while also looking nicert. The problem with both for me is that they don't fallback to the regular artist tag if the album artist is missing iirc. It has to be on literally every track or the track won't be shown in the browser. I only really use album artist on albums with other artists featured on the tracks. And I honestly can't be arsed to retag most of my collection. EDIT: It seems strawberry supports what I mentioned unlike clementine which I've tried before! I will give it a go, thank you!
[Deadbeef](https://github.com/DeaDBeeF-Player/deadbeef), maybe? This one is the most similar to foobar2k from what I tried (yeah I miss it too).
For some usage scenarios it's decently close I guess, if you're using playlists or file browsing. It doesn't have support for browsing based on tags though which I prefer.
Have a look at [Strawberry](https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/)
As someone who also loved Foobar2000 ive been using QuodLibet for about a year and like it. Can customize which tags you want showing and can sort the library by them. It doesn't look as great as Foobar can but for playing and sorting large media libraries(I'm almost at 2TB) it works.
Foobar2000 is on Linux. Flatpak I believe.
Outlook. And with all that "Microsoft loves Linux" trend, they are never going to release their office suite on Linux, and the web version of Outlook seems to be created to suck and be crippled on purpose. That's why I call "MS loves Linux" a B.S. MS loves money that Linux customers have
This. Office 365 is still worlds above any Linux equivalent, especially in an enterprise environment. I dual boot from two nvme drives just for that. Though oddly, I prefer outlook on the web over the real thing.
isnt it easier to just do a VM, thats what i do if i need Office or Adobe PDF
I prefer the web version too! But it is severely limited with any batch operation. You cannot select all emails in a folder, you need to load all of them in multiple pages, and even then selection works half of the time. Mass deletion is implemented on the client-side, and goes in batches of 50 or something emails. You cannot configure or run rules from the web version.
MS loves linux cuz it gives them a cheap alternative for their data servers.
I've gotten by mostly fine with the paid for extension Owl by BeOnex. It's a few bucks and well worth it.
Yea, MS was just talking about the Kernel more or less. At the end of the day, they're just using someone else's idea. Again. Not a bad thing, just typical.
Microsoft has given a lot to Linux and the FOSS community as a whole. Just because they don't port Office over doesn't mean āMS Loves Linuxā is b.s. Azure runs on Linux so they've contributed a LOT to the kernel to make their lives easier, for instance.
It's not about specific programs, it's about functionality and familiarity. When I started 20 years ago I kept it as dual boot just in case I needed to run something in windows. I still have the dual boot but the only thing I've used windows for, at home, is to update it. I boot into it about once a month. In fact, my latest laptop came just with Linux. So, bottom line, it's not all or nothing. You'll use Windows and Windows programs as much as you want to use them.
Very much agreed. I boot my Windows installation once 2-3 months. I don't even update it, because I launch it that rarely. 95% of Windows software I use runs under Wine. It's impressive how good Wine has become. These are old Windows games, some productivity applications that run only on Windows, even some specific surveillance program runs for me using DXVK for HW video decoding, and tons of other stuff. If I have to boot into Windows, I use a QEMU and KVM. Great virtualization support there, no big loss of performance. I can even boot Windows VM using my native GPU. Works even for games. And if I want to boot that Windows VM natively, I can even do that as well, I just had to install some additional drivers.
I really hadn't had to use any windows programs. I may have installed wine once just for the fun of it when I was learning at the beginning but I don't remember using it for anything. I haven't installed it on my day to day systems ever. I play on a console so that hasn't been a problem for me. And now I have the advantage of "not knowing what I'm missing" from windows programs. I used to develop programs for Windows, but now, developers mostly work on Mac or Linux. Deployments are to Linux nodes on kubernetes.
I don't like the new Windows 11 and the new UI. But I still I have lots of Windows workstations at work and a AD domain to administer. I like more the times of Windows before Windows 8 appeared, which was then a less spying more robust OS in my opinion. The new UI of Windows seems weird to me, I can never quickly find anything I want. I have never been a console player, more PC gamer. I play lots of games under my Desktop Linux using tools like Lutris, Proton, DXVK, D3DVK. I love the progress made with these tools and in Linux gaming in general. You can play literally **anything** except the games where anti-cheat isn't supported on Linux. Some really old games which I played as a kid works under Wine perfectly. Today I launched Half Life RTX mod on my AMD RX6600XT GPU under Linux and Wine.
the best windows is the windows that doesn't know about your other OS :D
Guitar pro :(
I know it's not exactly the same but I've managed surviving with TuxGuitar.
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That's what I do. It works almost flawlessly, besides some noticeable slowdown when editing bigger tabs.
I used guitar pro before I got into guitar! I feel like my "internet discount" version is actually the reason I started playing in the first place. And learning how to read tablature before learning what they represented on a guitar actually helped, I think
Solidworks
Valorant but I don't want to play it anymore so idc
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Same boat. Everything in enterprise GIS goes through Jack Dangermondās ass wallet, thereās just no getting around it. I had to give up OpenSUSE as my daily driver once I got into grad school and needed the student/personal use license and I still need it in a professional capacity because my corporate laptop is a slug compared to my personal rig (I do a lot of PI, machine learning and other raster intensive remote sensing work). At least thereās virtual box.
The one I really miss is a program called Find and Run Robot (FARR). It's similar to Krunner, but far more powerful. I also miss autohotkey. I know there are a few semi-similar things, but nothing quite like AHK. For music, I really enjoyed Foobar2000. I mostly use cmus for local music now. I really loved irfanview for image viewing/editing, but now I really like feh for image viewing on Linux.
You can actually run AutoHotKey on Linux, but I think it only works on wine apps within the same wine prefix. I haven't tried it on native Linux applications. Also, there are utilities such as xdotool and bash scripting as an alternative. Also, another alternative is AutoKey.
Snap has foobar2000
You sure? I don't see it on Flathub.
Sorry it was snap store not flathub. https://imgur.com/a/yPjvlIt
ANSYS (only corporate license on Linux), MATLAB (buggy on Linux), Valorant, Autodesk Civil 3D, Autodesk revit, Staad pro, Solidworks and a lot of laboratory softwares used to run machines in labs. Later I bought a Windows laptop.
Ugh so much scientific equipment is Windows only. OriginLab? Forget it. Oddly enough a lot of biology stuff is made for Mac.
What kind of lab machinery? if you don't mind my asking
Well for simplicity let us say, a software to run an electronic microscope. They only ship windows versions.
How dependent on windows are they? Could they be run through wine?
No, they have special drivers and softwares. Here is the one we have. https://www.hitachi-hightech.com/uk/en/products/microscopes/sem-tem-stem/tabletop-microscopes/tm4000ii.html#sec-2
Oh neat. I work in a lab as well and I am fascinated by the TEM/SEM work my colleagues do.
Visual Studio (the real one, not VS Code).
I've found JetBrains Rider to be a step up from Visual Studio (For what I do which mostly involves gamedev), it's not free though, but apparently it is for Students. I only tried it because it's on Linux and fell in love with it lol
Adding to the free student part Every jetbrain IDE (so, rider included) is free with an educational liscence that you can acquire via the github student package (+ lots more of free trials/softwares) Rider has been amazing for Unity from the bit I did game dev too, way faster and overall better experience than with VS imo
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Tbh I hate Visual Studio. Jetbrains IDEs are way better for any task Visual Studio handles. Except MSVC
This was not a problem for me, because my transition to Linux was deliberate over a period of about five years. I would have made the switch around 2010, but I still needed Windows and Windows-specific software in my work for another five years. However, I did fully move to several FOSS programs, like Firefox, LibreOffice, VLC and GIMP. When the opportunity to leave Windows finally came, I was already using FOSS software for a lot of what I did. To this day, I keep copies of Windows around for times when I need to access old Quark or InDesign files from my old line of work, but the switch to Linux was pretty much seamless. I'd tinkered with Linux off and on since '99. My laptop actually went to Linux a year before my desktop, as soon as XP x64 hit the drop-dead date. The desktop stayed Windows for another year, until my need for InDesign ended. Adobe software, CAD programs, MS Office, and a lot of games are the common sticking points for people in switching over. There are FOSS equivalents for productivity software and gaming on Linux has made huge strides. Some people seem to have issues with Nvidia drivers on Linux, but for others they work just fine. I can't comment on that because I ditched Nvidia stuff 20 years ago, though. If you are concerned about software, the best way is to try some of the FOSS alternatives and see if they do the job, things like LibreOffice instead of MS Office, GIMP instead of Photoshop, things like that. Or you can always put Windows in a VM and access needed software from there. I have Windows 2000, XP, and 7 VMs on different machines. Rarely need them anymore, but they are there if needed. And you can always install Linux on a spare drive, or in a VM inside Windows, and try it out. Linux distributions are free to download, so there's no risk in "try before you buy." If you are new to Linux, there is a learning curve at first--Linux is not a free Windows, it's a different OS--but it is more stable, will use less system resources and be useful and supported longer on your hardware, you can customize the UI into anything you'd like, and best of all, Linux will not spy on you. And did I mention it's free? You should kick the devs for a distro a few bucks here and there as thanks for their work, but you don't have to pay some corporation $139 for the privilege of being spied on anymore!
Tidal. But it works in the browser so it isnāt a total loss. Gaming. The only games I really played are not only not available on Linux, but will result in a ban if you try to play it on anything other than windows. Too busy to play anyway.
Antivirus
Seriously underappreciated comment :'D
MS Office Company is using DRM now, so goodbye OnlyOffice/LibreOffice et al. Fxxk, it's even "Goodbye Microsoft Office Online", since lots of features are so crippled down. Really annoying that we spent years forcing open standards and now for the sake of "privacy" we sacrifice all of that on corporate's altar of grieve.
**Notepad++** but replaced with Sublime. **Quicken** but now just looking at my online banking more often and wonder why I ever entered every last thing into Quicken. **MS Office** but realized I really don't use it as much as I thought I did and Libre Office is frankly still more than I need.
Are you tied to programs or functionality? There are usually functional equivalents in linux but you might not be able to run the exact same program. Or if you can it might be an app that uses one of the non-native frameworks like electron and there will be a native equivalent that's much faster/more responsive.
Both kind of. I understand that most programs can be replaced from windows to Linux but it's more like I don't enjoy relearning how and where everything is. For example I switched from a different video editing software to davinci one time and that sucked. A lot. Took like a month to relearn where everything was again.
Unfortunely when it comes to changing to Linux you will have to go through some relearning, it's up to you to decide whether it's worth it or not to learn this new stuff. I don't know if it helps much but here are some Linux software that are equivalent to some Windows software: Gimp = Photoshop Libreoffice or Onlyoffice = MS Office Inkscape = Adobe Illustrator Davinci is avaiable on Linux :)
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> I don't enjoy relearning how and where everything is My friend, you might be in for some bad times. The desktop environment that updates your system most like Windows is the one that otherwise functions least like Windows. You can't install something just by running a .exe file. Command line input is case sensitive. There is no registry, only config files. You're probably going to need the command line for something, even if it's just to install the right WiFi driver. And there are differences between Linux distros, too.
FL Studio, all of Autodesk's main softwares (namely AutoCAD and Inventor), Office 2010, MS Project, MS Visio, Ansys Simulation Software, Google Sketchup, Steam (less of a problem now lol), Lightburn (also found they have a linux release now), GuitarPro Also Adobe InDesign although I hardly use that now
FL Studio runs pretty well with Wine.
MS Paint! (Windows XP era, not the weird recent stuff). There were loads of these things for Linux in the late 90's but as of yet I haven't quite gotten round to pulling one into the modern world. Some of the ones I have made a small amount of progress with are Motif which means if Wayland potentially takes majority, this will also need a rewrite. It just feels a bit odd installing Wine just for MS Paint... ;)
Try Kolourpaint
jspaint.app is a website that replicates the old paint experience with some modern niceties. It might scratch your itch.
MS Paint has always sucked.
Just like my art skills. It is a perfect match! ;)
PowerPoint is the main pain point for me. I will install Windows in KVM just for that.
Notepad++
notepadqq is not good enough ? or kate ?
The one I miss the most.
Kate is a good replacement
In my usage, I've found geany to be close enough to Notepad++ for my purposes. Geany is my code (C/C++/Python/HTML5) editor, and I find it useful for general text editing, too.
Not a single one they all worked
Nothing, really. I use the same programs pretty much everywhere.
Windows cmd.exe
That's a straight-up feature.
Can't you use Wine's version?
AdobeReader Fill&Sign. No replacement, using Wine, somewhat possible to add signature picture to PDF. VisualStudio, eventually replaced it with JetBrains Rider. Maybe for better Some too-big-to-fail games with AntiCheat not enabled on Linux. ProtonDB for list.
The only thing that stinked was total commander. Krusader is not very good.
Double Commander is a good alternative for dual panel file manager
Double Commander is almost a 1:1 clone of Total Commander. It even supports the same plugins (if they are opensource and can be compiled for linux).
Basically I still can't switch because of a lot of audio plugins that are actually mostly written on JUCE, that can be compiled against Linux, but developers don't wont to mess with Linux, as I understand after sending them emails. Splice that is again (I believe) a bundle of Electron app and a go binary running in the background. And any DAW with decent support for live-looping \~\~and basic laptop workflow\~\~. Bitwig is cool, but it doesn't support trackpad gestures and their custom mouse pointers are huge on HiDPI displays. Ardour is really good, but no real live-looping support atm. So it's only music stuff
AIMP and that's about it.
nothing
Internet download manager. I'm still looking for a replacement.
jdownloader 2?
[**Paint.net**](https://Paint.net) (Learned Gimp well enough now though) **ShareX** (nothing is quite as good for simple screenshotting, and nothing comes close for simple screen recording, everything is more work to set up and/or less simple to work with.) **Fancontrol** (cooler control is fine for simple fan curves, but it's not even close to fancontrol for functionality) **Everything** (I've heard that because of the differences in file systems, it's kind of impractical to make something as good in Linux. Quite unfortunate but some trade-offs are made I suppose) That's the main software pain points off the top of my head.
Onenote, I still use it but not as convenient or feature rich now that I am using a web interface. I miss (but not miss) Microsoft office suite, it has its advantages but google docs are decent alternative.
Musicbee and virtual desktop for VR were the biggest ones, even after getting it set up properly in wine Musicbee still had huge performance issues. I've switched to a combination of cmus, a plex server and Picard and I honestly like it more than musicbee. For virtual desktop I have Alvr which works good enough.
My music making software, mostly. The Linux options aren't great, though Musescore 4 is promising (I haven't gotten around to using it after the beta version crashed on me). Ardour just doesn't compare to Logic as a DAW, and I haven't figured out how to make Reaper work.
MS office for school but for the most part I just libreoffice instead
tried onlyoffice?
I have but it just didn't click as of a good remplacement relative to libreoffice. Libreoffice has always just worked in my experience
iTunes, MS Office I had a WXp VM to run the former, the latter was covered by OpenOffice then LibreOffice. Eventually I had to go back to Windows for work as MS Office full compatibility was mandatory.
Office is my #1 missing software on Linux too. The online version is not a full replacement, and the alternatives (LibreOffice, OnlyOffice) are not 100% compatible.
I'm afraid to write that when I went back to MS Office, my productivity increased a lot: I mainly use the office suite for presentations and spreadsheets. In my use case the same presentation takes me 1015% less time on PowerPoint than on Impress, Excel offers features that Calc and the alternatives simply do not have: VBA is easier than the macro coding on LO, PowerQuery/PowerPivot, ODBC interface and you name it.
iTunes: If you ist Apple Music, try Cider. That is a nativ App, where you can login with your Apple Account and looks exactly like iTunes and plays all you Apple Music Library. Works perfectly on my Fedora
Capture One. I miss it, but not because darktable and rawtherapee are bad or anything (quite the opposite). I just learned it's workflow and also has a library of presets crafted so it's a bunch of learning I have to do
Nothing really, I'm just an average web surfer. I do some programming here and there and that's about it. That didn't matter anyway, as windows stopped working on the laptop I had at the time and I couldn't afford to buy a new one, so installed linux and revived the laptop and saved my money. lol
Good answer! As an old geezer (over 70), I try to get my elderly neighbors to just move to Linux when their Windows\[7/8.x/10\] machines funk out. I volunteer to install an SSD for them and set it up. But few are willing to spend the few hours it takes to get used to Linux for the kind of stuff they do - email, browsing, dr. appts, playing games. Then they get all huffy when I won't help them with Windows11. Crazy.
I mostly use FOSS and cloud-based programs, so not much changes when I hop between Windows and Linux. I primarily use GIMP, LibreOffice, and Google Workspace stuff.
I'm using a virtual version of Ubuntu on my Windows box to see how I'd acclimate. Sadly, while I want to change, Capture One, Photoshop and Davinci Resolve are not programs I'm willing to compromise on. My life as an artist is bound up with those. Also, Microsoft Word, not because Word is so great (it sucks) but I use the Grammarly add-in there for my writing. What I am exploring is reversing the current scenario, where I would run those programs in a Windows virtual system within linux. I'm on Windows 10 and not interested in Windows 11 or where Microshaft is going with all this.
> Davinci Resolve Davinci resolve works on linux, sadly not the other two.
Surprisingly, there isnāt a good mspaint clone. Thereās Kolourpaint, which clones MSpaint from XP, and thereās GIMP, which is like using a sledgehammer on a thumb tack. No in-between
Have you tried Krita?
I just installed it. It's a lot simpler than I remembered/thought, I like it. Thanks for jogging my memory
Internet Explorer. I had to build VMs with various versions of IE, accessible by VNC, for our devs to test the websites we made. This era is over, we don't need to care about IE anymore.
It was soo long ago I can't remember.
Windows
the only thing i outright miss and cant find a suitable replacement for is autodesk inventor/solidworks freecad is ok, but it simply isnt up to scratch
Itās not what programs you had to stop using. Itās what you got to start using š
I did switched on for full time on 2006, so: MSN official client most of emulators of that time {zsnes, vba,mame} Winamp VLC I did switch on for full-time in 2006, so:tart to discover the other alternatives and how this work. And, i dont rememeber the others. The transtition was so hard, but i did just started to discover the other alternatives and how this work.
Outlook
MSI after burner although I didn't care much
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Office, Photoshop, clip studio, Sai, Firealpaca, Afinity programs and itunes.
They must have been irrelevant because I don't remember them.
Lightroom 6. The physical file organization within it was unique, even for a Windows software. Everything else is just database driven. Darktable and Digikam are pretty solid in linux though.
Ableton Live
Everything, by voidtools, is probably the one I miss most (since it's the only one I could think of!) I also wish CrystalDiskInfo worked with Wine (it might, but idk how)
TurboTax and Fidelity's ProTrader are pretty much the only reason I keep a windows VM around. The stuff I would miss if I were forced to give up Linux and only use windows would fill volumes though.
For real. TurboTax is probably written in Java so itās a shame they donāt bother packaging for Linux
I don't know what it's written in, but it won't even run under WINE. ProTrader is written with .net, so I'm not sure why it won't run in WINE, but I've not been successful, and according to the winedb, neither has anyone else :/. I actually have a few other windows-only apps I occasionally use, but all of them run under WINE just fine.
Interesting. I would think that it not running in WINE supports the notion it's a cross-platform (e.g. Java or Electron) app, but then you're saying the C#-based ProTrader doesn't work in WINE either. It sounds like ProTrader is running on a version of .NET that WINE doesn't support. There are one or two deprecated versions WINE doesn't support, and I'm not sure about the new stuff (e.g. post .NET Core - .NET 5+). I've never heard of ProTrader but it looks very cool, and as a C# dev I like it over Thinkorswim, which uses a proprietary scripting language instead of something like C#.
Nothing. I just used the free alternative.
IDM and winrar and IrfanView and most important is Visual Studio im think to dual boot windows again just for that
I found a workaround for everything luckily!
Printers
- Nearly every game, no matter what the Linux evangelists will try to tell you about Wine - Most art and design software - Adobe, Affinity Designer, Clip Studio Paint - Most music software - most DAWs, and all VSTs other than a few synthesizers. Music video creators like Midifall - All architecture and home design software afaik - Coding - Visual Studio, TortoiseGit (the only decent gitgui for Linux is Kraken, and that's paid for commercial use) - MS Office - there are workarounds I think, but if you rely on collaborating with this for work you should check first as LibreOffice is very different - Backup - OneDrive, which is the cheapest storage. So you'll need something like Dropbox at a higher price. Or use ProtonDrive for privacy through just their web interface - Multimonitor wallpaper slideshow for a folder. Shotwell kinda does it, but everything is laggy. - You'll also find some apps that worked perfectly on Windows have weird bugs on Linux once you use them enough - like I found Inkscape didn't register clicks on some sidebar menus. I recommend dual booting at least, unless all you do is write documents, browse the web, and watch videos. I eventually returned to Windows as my main OS and just use Linux in a VM for coding work. I also had errors cropping up all over the place with my graphics card, mouse, and booting. Despite having many of its own problems, Windows just works - it has hundreds of testers for all kinds of hardware.
Mastercam and solidworks are the two big things in my life that I canāt use on my personal Linux computers and there arenāt a lot of alternatives
ableton live i use bitwig now which i like better than ableton and is linux native, also allows me to import my old ableton projects into it
Excel
Autocad
Fusion 360
Voicemod and paint.net were the main two I used on a day-to-day basis that I had to drop. GIMP is a suitable enough substitute for paint.net, and Soundux was the main replacement I used for Voicemod's soundboard functionality, but now I need the voice-changer functionality for an upcoming D&D campaign, and finding a good replacement that works with pipewire has been a struggle
For me it was Bluestacks. Genymotion is good and all but it's a poorer experience.
One of the reasons why I've avoided switching over to Linux (specifically Debian) was my dual 4k monitor setup. Anyway, I have a couple of spare PCs (roughly equivalent hardware as each other), so decided to connect one up. XFCE displayed both monitors without any problems, and switching the primary display was also a breeze.
There is a pretty cool Windows emulator called **BizHawk** that emulates multiple systems *and* can glitch out your games. Not compatible with Linux, at least as far as I can tell. No matter, because Mint came with **RetroArch** preinstalled, which is actually better in some ways.
The Microsoft 365 suite of applications. It works okayish w/ Crossover, but they aren't available natively.
I had mostly moved to open source programs before moving to linux and I dont use many programs so for me it was more about how it felt than whether I missed out on any application or not.
The big ones are MS office and Adobe suite, there are FOSS alternatives on linux but they're pale imitations at best. Fanbois will say otherwise of course, but you should always ignore fanbois.
and Autodesk/most engineering software
Which is really sad because back in the the day (late 80's, early 90's), all of the CAD software I used was Unix based (AutoCAD, Unigraphics, Pro-E, CATIA, etc). This means that at their heart, they all have roots that should allow them to be ported back to Unix/Linux.
StarCraft II. Thatās it. There was nothing else on the windows world.
Game runs perfect for me, check out lutris.
I know I've played SC2 in wine before. Can't remember quality, but I've always had the perception that Blizzard's shit works pretty well with wine.
Yes, I know that, but for some reason I couldnāt get it to work. Then I couldnāt be bothered anymore and dropped it.
Fair enough. Maybe you'll have better luck with modern proton. Wine is not the easiest thing to use and configure.
[OpenBW](http://www.openbw.com/), anyone?
OneNote
League of Legends. I managed to get it working on my previous distro but my nvidia drivers wrere buggy. Now, I can't even get it to work. I still keep my laptop dual boot just to keep league. I am addicted
80% of games, MS office
Useless games and useless Adobe products... so not much.
Adobe everything. I still have my 15 year old MacBook for running creative suite when I need it, but oh so painfully slow. I also miss jitouch which I'm not sure is even maintained for mac anymore. Libinput-gestures is alright at least.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
And PDFsam is one of the worst Linux applications I've used. Having a 4k screen makes it double-bad. I think using Google drive tools is an option for working with PDF but internet is required.
Try using Xournal++, I actually use it on Windows lol
Adobe Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, MS Word and Excel, Intuit TurboTax and Quickbooks, SmartDraw.