Not really but we have Springer which isn’t much better

Deal with the real problem. Be honest about why people are upset. Let them actually speak their minds without judgement. Then, analyse it. Find solutions.

Exactly. The solution to people saying “Foreigners are taking our jobs” is not to outlaw saying “Foreigners are taking our jobs” (though the AfD has done enough other things that warrant a ban), it’s not to get rid of foreigners, it’s not even to create more jobs. It’s to make sure that people have at least their most important needs (housing, food, transport, access to information, basic entertainment) covered even with a part-time job or no job at all. Instead the CDU/CSU tries to brand everyone who doesn’t work 60 hours per week until they’re 70 as lazy. Guess what? There are way more people out there who would like to work but can’t (for whatever reason) than ones who actively try to cheat the system. And no increase of weekly working time, no mandatory Excel training for unemployed people and no right-shift of politics will solve that.

Show people that the left and center are able to provide what they need and they will have no reason to blame minorities for their problems.

Yeah, guess what? We should have banned them long before they became the “strongest opposition force in parliament”. Now that they poll over 20%, of course its tricky. Who would have thought?

My question was specifically about “the general non-technical population”. Do you expect my mom to even remotely understand what different servers are and why talking to me is securely encrypted but talking to her friends group isn’t? The point about secure software is that it needs to be secure by default or else, entry level users will manage to accidentally send their stuff in plain text and not even notice.

For nerds like us, I agree that Matrix is probably a good choice. For someone who needed to be told that “the internet” isn’t the blue “e” on their desktop… not so much. I’d rather send carrier pigeons than explain Matrix to my family.

What would you recommend as an alternative for the general non-technical population?

There were a few things that it eventually got but lacked for way too long like support for UNIX line endings.

For video editing I would highly recommend DaVinci Resolve. So far I’ve only used it on Windows because I haven’t had any need for it since my switch but it’s available for Linux as well.

So what do I do when I need to get something done on a deadline? VM? Dualboot? Just give up?

Please don’t interpret that as an attack, it’s a serious question. I would love to fully move to linux. I’ve put Arch on my laptop about a month ago as an experiment and overall it works great. But every time I need to be productive, I hit a wall. Especially with photo editing but even for software development (mostly C# and C++), Windows 10 + WSL feels like the better choice.

Well, are you a developer?

I am. I have written software, both open source and commercial, for almost twenty years now and the most important lesson I have learned in that time is that developers alone don’t write good software. You need to listen to UI/UX experts, testers and user feedback to make something that people actually want to use.

Just for maybe an hour or so, haven’t had time for more. It seems a bit better but still too different from everything else to assume people can „just“ use it instead of the solution they are familiar with.

Gimp really needs the kind of in-depth UI/UX redesign that blender got with 2.8.

I tried again and again to do the things I need to do with gimp but it still lacks many features and the ones it does have are hard to use. Sometimes it’s not about ideology but about needing to get shit done.

I have used Vivaldi as my main browser pretty much since the initial release and it’s great.

Telegram on desktop shows all participants on the left if the window is over a certain width so you don’t have to move your eyes left and right over the whole screen.

As a daily driver through most of university. Sadly the hardware got way too expensive for what it did, at least for a while. These days it might be better again but I won’t buy an MBP to replace a laptop that’s only a year old.

Cool. Can you help me solve mine so I don’t have them either?

Thanks for the long reply, lots of stuff to unpack here that I might have to come back to later. Might be helpful.

So for now, let me focus on your question about my photography workflow. I mostly do event photography (discos, concerts, conventions) but also occasionally studio and travel stuff.

When I come home from a shoot, I copy my photos to a network drive on my home server (running Ubuntu) which automatically gets backed up to an off-site NAS. As a first step, I use Bridge to label which photos I want to edit for myself, which for a potential client, which not at all. Nothing special, just running through all RAWs and marking them with star or color labels. For the editing step itself, I start out with Camera Raw. First an overall pass with lens correction, cropping/straightening, brightness adjustments (exposure, contrast, blacks/darks/lights/whites), white balance, dehaze, curves, whatever the photo needs. Then, depending on the subjact, a more in depth pass with spot removal and masked adjustments. Automatic subject masking has been a great time saver. If I need to go even more in depth (usually only for photos that go to an exhibition), I start editing in photoshop. As a last step, I use Photoshop Image processor to bulk export JPGs in the needed size and quality, optionally with a watermark.

(for those familiar with Adobe’s tools, you might be wondering why I don’t use Lightroom instead. In the past I’ve had problems with accessing the same library from different machines. This could probably be fixed but my current setup works fine so I never bothered)

For long term library management, I run immich on my home server which lets me tag and filter my photos as much as I want.

As for the Blender thing, I think I phrased that weirdly. It was not related to a specific problem or my photo editing process. It was just an example for a piece of software that started out with horrible developer-user UI and got a lot better when they completely redid the UI in 2.8.

Regarding Photoshop in Wine: unfortunately, missing GPU support is probably a no-go when dealing with 6000x4000 pixel, 14 bits per channel raw photos.

Also a tiny bit amusing that within 24 hours, it was rated it both “Garbage: It launches, that about it.” and “Silver: it pretty much works well with a few caveats.”

One of my first experiences with linux was gentoo back in ~2006 so patience is not an issue. Documentation that requires you to already know what you need to do is a problem though and the exact reason why I haven’t touched proper Arch so far.

The right choice doesn’t help me if I can’t get my literal job done and have to give up half of my hobbies.

Why?

I don’t ask that to talk you out of it. I like desktop Linux. I’m typing this on desktop Linux. I’ve been using desktop Linux for most of my adult life. I ask because your reasons will inform the advice people can give you.

Because enshittification is becoming more and more unbearable. So far, Windows 10 (and to some extent even Windows 11) works for me but it’s getting worse and worse every year. I have no interest in OneDrive, Copilot, Recall and whatever MS wants to sell me next. I’d rather have a system that does exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less. On servers and embedded systems, linux has done a great job for me over the last 20 (!) years.

Another option is to run Windows in a VM for those apps.

Kind of defeats the purpose if I run my two most-used applications in a Windows VM, doesn’t it?

I’m more than open for using something different and learning a different workflow as long as I can eventually get to the point where I can get roughly the same results in roughly the same time. I like tinkering with stuff and I’m not even opposed to write my own tools for closing a few gaps in the applications I use (see my recently started immichtools). But there is a limit. I just can’t afford to spend half my day working around problems that I wouldn’t have had on Windows.

Edit: formatting