neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet

I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I’d add that they’re not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.

The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that’s never been the goal of either program.

Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it’s now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that’s never been the goal of any of those programs. They’re separate kit and as far as I’m aware always will be.

Inkscape: Completely capable. I know many people who have used it instead of illustrator professionally for years.

GIMP: Depends on you. As someone who learned GIMP long before ever learning Photoshop, I find Photoshop unintuitive and frankly stupid. So it’s all about what you learned on. But GIMP relies on spending a few minutes setting it up for your own use case. Literally every window can be moved to anywhere. You can have whatever windows you want open all the time, or hidden behind right clicks, etc… Your tabs and tab groups are completely customizable to how you want to work. BUT the rub is that you have to be interested in doing that. GIMP is trashed for having a bad default UI because the expectation is that it doesn’t have a default UI. My GIMP would look entirely different from someone elses because I use different tools that I want front and centre than someone else might. If you’re not interested in that and just want something that you can learn a “default” setup and go with it (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that) than you’re better off sticking with Photoshop.

As for Krita, whatever else people are telling you, Krita is NOT a replacement for GIMP if you’re doing design work. What it brings to the table in terms of having built in Vector capabilities it negates by having a very limited and basic suite of selection tools. Something that would take you two seconds in PS or Gimp to band select, paint the foreground, feather the selection, shrink it, etc… takes five extra steps in Krita because Krita is a drawing program not a graphic design program; what few “advanced” selection tools they’ve introduced is tacked on and hidden between three or four extra steps because it just wasn’t designed to have them at first and they were added later.

Just because it looks nicer out of the box than Gimp, doesn’t make it better. I’ve tried replacing Gimp with Krita because i like the KDE suite of apps in general. But I was pulling my hair out trying to do even a basic composition using it’s archaic selection tools.

Plasma:

“Here’s literally all the things… You sort it out, if you want. If not…whatever.”

Didn’t say anything about auto-updating. Just can’t be bleeding edge and use proprietary drivers, that’s all. Other (AMD) use the open source drivers, so they don’t have that issue. And that’s great. But if you use the NVIDIA propietary drivers, you can’t race ahead of them.

That doesn’t make the drivers bad; they work perfectly fine; and have far far far better performance than AMD. There’s just the trade-off that you can’t be bleeding edge when using them.

You take the good you take the bad you take them both and there you have…the facts of life.

You’re argument that drivers are bad because you can’t fuck around with your system without them breaking is disingenuous. If you buy a brand new Wacom tablet, and it turns out that it’s too new and the Kernel doesn’t support it yet, or no one has written a patch to get it working, you don’t claim that Wacom is a shit company. It’s just a fact of life that you have to wait for either the kernel to update or for someone to get a patch working.

But when it comes to NVIDIA…holy shit… WORST, period, COMPANY, period, EVER!!! And that’s just hypocritical.

Not an assumption.

I freely admit that it’s an anecdotal fallacy in that it’s based entirely on my own experience and may or may not reflect the larger reality. But it would only be an assumption if it’s something that I was just guessing was true, whereas I’ve been around the Linux world long enough to see it first hand.

Keeps jumping to the latest kernel instead of the latest stable release.

Blames nvidia for not keeping up…

I’ve been on Manjaro for years and have literally NEVER had your issue. Why, because I don’t just automatically change to the latest kernel and then wonder why shit doesn’t work.

After an update, it’ll tell me if a newer kernel is available, I’ll look at it and if its a new stable release I’ll change to it with no issue because an NVIDIA update was likely included with that update.

Stop forcing early adoption on your computer and then blaming others when it fucks up your shit.

Okular is great. Kate is amazing. Kdenlive is BY FAR the most advanced FOSS video editor. I’d easily put Kdenlive above Krita, but that’s because of my particular use case.

Are you even a Linux user if you don’t randomly wonder what operating system the person in front of you in traffic prefers? It’s a good thing that this person says “wonder no more.”

Is that what that is?! It just randomly started happening and I thought an update screwed up my compositor.

So with that question answered, how the hell do I turn it off, because it’s annoying as hell.

I want to say the Natron compositing software, but I could be misremembering.

I seem to recall it losing it’s only maintainer and therefore being updated or maintained anymore. I want to say this was back in 2018, but since it’s not a piece of kit I use often, I don’t really think about it enough for it to stick in my head. Anyway…point being. It posted a fairly large update in 2022 and has been doing updates since then.

You sir (or madam) are a gentleman (gentlewoman) and a scholar.

That was exactly the problem. Some digging around in the config file showed a duplicate system tray hidden just off screen. Probably happened when I was moving panels around.

Thanks!

The full saying is “Free as in Speech, not Free as in Beer”

Basically the “Free” in free means that it’s free to do with as you please, modify, etc… But not free as in “here’s a free product…like getting a free beer”

Ha ha. No no. I’m pretty good. No problems with the old downstairs plumbing. But it’s not just for toilets. It’s for bathtub sinks clogged with hair. Kitchen sinks, etc… It’s just handy to have around the house. I even used it once to blow the dust out of my dryer vent.

I’m not really talking about development as simply programming. There are a lot of aspects that go into development, yes…programming is a big aspect.

But there’s also bug reporting (every user should know how to report bugs because it’s contributes to making the program better).

Heck, you can even download the documentation and give it a proof-read if you’re good with grammar and spot some errors if you don’t want to commit to helping to write it.

I know a lot of people who spend a lot of time in the various subs for the software, taking care to answer questions from other users who need help doing this or that. That again, is contributing.

Then there’s simply what we’re doing right now. Bringing attention to the projects online getting them more visibility.

Development of a successful FOSS app isn’t just about programming. And even small contributions count. If you can donate some coin, great! If you can’t, or don’t want to, there are a thousand other things that you can do to contribute to that apps community.

I emphasized the word community because that is exactly what it is. The ethos of Open Source; what makes it different than Propietary software, is that the users are an inherent part of the development process in ways both big and small. In propietary software, there is a distinct line between the developers and the users. Developers have multiple stakeholders of which the user base is certainly one, but also include advertisers, software makers, hardware makers, etc…

FOSS software, in contrast, is much more a communitee effort with the involvement of the community in the way of bug reports, literature, education and even simply championing the project because they don’t have millions of dollars in advertising budgets.

Sorry, I get a little passionate, so this is longer than I intended it to be.

But tl;dr, contributing isn’t just about money or just about programming. There’s a thousand ways big and small, and my issue isn’t with people not “paying” necessarily. But people who use it for free and don’t bother filing bug reports, don’t join the community online to help answer user questions, etc…

A good FOSS citizen should be an active part of the community. Or donate money to the project if they’d rather not.

It’s essentially a handheld air cannon. The kit comes with a handle and a suction that covers the toilet hole or whatever. You press down and yeah…it’s basically a air-gun shot to the clog.

And yeah. It works great. Not always on the first blast. But I’ve never had it fail me.

This little bad boy here has changed my life.

https://www.isicanadainc.com/product/one-second-plumber/

This software is extensively free (as in beer)

No…it’s not. It’s free to download and to use, but the expectation that people contribute in exchange for using it is how FOSS has always worked.

That doesn’t necessarily mean monetary. But contributing can be helping with user guides, or making youtube tutorials, or even just extending the reach of the program to friends and family by talking about it.

There are many ways to contribute, and money is one. But the notion that Open Source software is “free as in beer” has never been correct. Users have an expectation to contribute…period.

Unfortunately, there has always been the issue that a not-insignificant percentage of users of FOSS software believe the FREE part means “free as in beer” and take umbrage when asked to contribute.

I’ve long been a proponent (and I know I’m in a minority) that has advocated for a shift in the marketing of FOSS applications from “donation based” to “value based”. Meaning that the expectation is that if you enjoy the software, you pay an amount that you believe is commensurate to your use. This is voluntarily of course…if you can’t pay, than please use it and enjoy it. But those who can pay, should pay…at least a little bit, to offset the costs for those who can’t.

It’s more or less that the wording of FOSS apps needs to change so that you are expected to contribute if you can.

Just my opinion. Like I said, I know I’m in the minority. Just not a fan of the percentage of users that has always existed that (falsely) think that asking for money for your project is somehow anathema to the Open Source ideal and whine whenever they’re asked to contribute.

Hard to pin a number on it, percentage-wise.

• Desktop and laptop are both running Linux.
• Chromebook wiped and running Linux.
• Most software, but definitely not all. Steam, Resolve being the two biggest non-foss items on my desktop, while my ex-Chromebook has a proprietary screenwriting program, as well as OnlyOffice instead of LibreOffice because I need much better Excel compatibility for work and LO still isn’t quite there for it.
• Phone android. But not entirely de-googled. Replaced drive with syncthing, keep with Joplin, photos, phone, and messenger with their Fossify equivalents and disabled the originals. Replaced gboard with heliboard, etc…

But can’t/won’t completely replace the OS yet because both google pay and android auto are essential to me and getting them working on most replacements is still a royal pain in the butt.

So let’s call it 80%, maybe a bit more?

It’s been a long time since I last installed Linux on a two hard-drive system, so take this advice as “likely not necessary, but will probably fix your issue”

The installer asks whether or not you want to “replace” the existing OS or install alongside. And if you’re fairly new to linux (like I was at the time) it can be tricky to see at a glance which hard-drive you want to install it to and which you don’t.

So to be doubly cautious and make sure that didn’t happen, I simply unplugged my secondary harddrive during the install so that the installer would automatically be reading the correct one. Then all I had to do was choose “replace” or “install alongside” without worrying about anything else.

The drawback to that was, once the install was complete and I re-attached my second drive, I had to configure it to auto-mount and do some work on that, but at least my computer was working.