this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
1144 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
59589 readers
2838 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Windows Debloat Tool:
https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
I run this on any new Win install. I also suggest Portmaster so you know where your data is going (I use it on Linux too!)
https://safing.io/
However, if you can, it is really worth switching to Linux. Linux is built as a tool by the people using the tool. Windows is making a product. Enough said.
If people would like to "try Linux before you buy," check out DistroSea. It spins up a virtual machine of whatever distro and flavour you choose to try.
https://distrosea.com/
There are a surprising and growing number of Linux compatible tools. Software is usually why people have a hard time switching. If you're dependent on Photoshop/Adobe, check out:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
Gamers should check out:
https://www.protondb.com/
This site shows how well games run on Proton (compatibility tool) and people offer solutions to get them running if there's any snags.
DaVinci Resolve is not a replacement for Photoshop/Adobe as a whole, but it is a decent replacement for Adobe products AfterEffects and Premier.
For Photoshop alternatives, I'd start with GIMP for photo editing or Krita for illustration and digital painting.
I'm still on Windows because my drawing app of choice is Clip Studio Paint, which has no Linux version. I've read and watched several guides to getting CSP running on Linux, but it still scares me off.
But this Recall thing is so insidious to me... I might try to get it working on Linux anyway.
I've been a LONG time user of Adobe, grew up with PhotoDeluxe and pre-suite Photoshop and used every version of Cretive Suite since my parents ran a graphic design business. I made all my high school essays in InDesign CS4. Suffice to say, growing bitter over proprietary software in the last few years has been painful but I'm doing my best to move to only FOSS.
There was a point in time I tried replacing Premiere with DaVinci Resolve, but I quickly noticed it was oriented for color correction, and some of its features for composition were locked behind Fusion. These days, if you can believe it, I do all my video editing in Blender. It's still got a long way to go, but since v4 the VSE has gotten really good. I'd like to try kdenlive when I finish migrating to Linux, but on Windows it basically doesn't support GPU encoding which is a dealbreaker for me.
Adobe Fresco is replaced quite well by Krita. It has a learning curve but is far more powerful as a result. I'm still learning but I'm impressed.
I don't really like Scribus, but I don't really have a need for software like InDesign, so I haven't had to worry about it.
I've used Inkscape way back just because it was portable when Illustrator wasn't. It was pretty minimal back then but I can see it's grown greatly in depth. The workflow is enough to be disruptive, but not too badly to work through I think.
And finally the titan, Photoshop. It's such a massive and ubiquitous software that it simply cannot be replaced by any single program. At least since I moved to drawing in Fresco I don't use PS for that, but again Krita is a fine replacement. Pixel art in PS is very normal too, but that's replaced quite nicely by Aseprite, it's more capable in that space and still quite easy to use if you don't know its features. It's the photo editing and general purpose image editing that's the real challenge. I keep hoping that version 3 of GIMP will magically fix its problems, but in the meantime it's frustratingly clear that it's built by software engineers, not artists, but it's often made out that it's everybody else's burden to forget everything they know and start from scratch to learn its special workflow. There's an interesting patch someone made called PhotoGIMP that's supposed to improve that, but I haven't spent enough time with it to really say. Currently my only alternative is Photopea. It works great right now, but I don't like that it's a web app and not FOSS. I really hope I can eventually find an alternative that I can finally be comfortable with.