Space-G

The Brazillian Menace™

Discord username: spaceg

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lifning
@lifning

so Linux got power-leveled by Valve in recent years to now be an entirely viable platform for gaming, which is certainly an interesting future to be living in after the main thing you'd hear about it in the late naughts and early 2010's was "oh yeah sure Photoshop and Office may work well in WINE, but i'm a gamer and barely any games work besides WoW"

but now i'm feeling pretty bad for creatives (visual artists, authors, journalists, programmers, anything) who are going to imminently be forced to reckon with the dissonance resulting from the combination of:

  • angry about everything they do already being fed into GPT models without their consent, and Microsoft getting exponentially more forceful about baking that and other cybercrud into Windows on every level
  • annoyed at people telling them to switch to Linux (perhaps they've even tried before, but, say, their tablet didn't have pressure sensitivity when they ran their ClipStudioPaintToolSai CS6 on wine, and Krita and GNU IMP didn't work for them)
  • staying on Windows 10 without becoming a ransomware/etc. liability isn't an option past its EoL in 2025
  • trying to rough it on Windows 11+ will mean playing whack-a-mole with opt-out settings and whatever new de-bloat scripts appear (and fixing whatever they break) for the rest of time
  • getting a Mac would be all the cost of overpriced hardware and the pain of migration (if their tools even exist there) just to push the rot of capital into a different corner for a while

(for whatever it's worth, my professional opinion for anyone who wants to try Linux but is feeling lost at sea amid all this is to imagine an edited version of that Verge article about buying whatever Brother printer is on sale, but it's about putting whatever the latest Fedora Plasma Desktop is on a flash drive and booting it. i don't even use Fedora any more or like RedHat much at all; it's just the pragmatic choice for newcomers in current year. yes, moreso than Debian derivatives. a discussion of why would be far too exhausting and miss the point of this post. but if you (and the nerdiest person you know that's gonna be helping you with it) have a strong preference, then as Debians/Ubuntus go, you could do much worse than Mint -- which apparently even includes a built-in tutorial nowadays.)


MewMus
@MewMus

This is the reason why I pivoted my entire workflow recently to Krita and why I'd slowly shifted the rest of it to open source over the last four or so years.

I'm on Linux Mint full time now sure, but I did have to sacrifice CSP and a bunch of smaller convenience art tools to do so. Being a full time artist that makes games and not a "gamer" per-say has this dissonance to it, in which things are the best they ever have been on Linux atm, but are still far less convenient or UX friendly than fighting Windows.

As an Artist at the moment options are insanely limited.

  • Linux
    • Has a learning curve no matter what evangelists will say
    • Has a huge elitism culture that doesn't take critique well, making it hard to trouble shoot the more esoteric issues artists will encounter (as creative things just aren't as platform mature)
    • Genuinely lacks a lot of tools that professionals need (though folks are trying to fix this)
    • May have solutions to most problems, but offers up some of the worst user experience out there
    • [Edit] I get that the last two of these are a massive funding issue mostly, but that doesn't mean they aren't an issue
  • MacOS
    • Has an expensive and locked eco system starting point
    • Consistently kills support for old software and hardware you may be reliant on
      • (I literally can't use my graphics tablet because it's too old and Wacom doesn't maintain up to date drivers for Mac, which Apple killed support for)
    • Despite the huge strives in efficiency and performance that have been gained through their own silicon, still falls well behind a similarly priced device from anyone else
  • Windows
    • Is constantly pushing more advertising in platform (for it's $100 OS)
    • Doesn't believe you deserve a shred of privacy
    • Is so "AI pilled" that it's going to destroy itself or radically change for the worst due to copilot
    • Just allows kernel level execution from installed programs and other security nightmares

Shits rough and whilst I have seen a lot of improvement in recent years towards being more industry ready for artists from many open source projects (Godot and Blender in particular!) many desperately need documentation and user experience teams overhauling entire programs.

I have a whole additional post I want to write about my full time switch from Windows to Linux, plus the far more dramatic shift in my workflow from CSP to Krita, but I need to get my thoughts better together on such things first.


[Edit] This has "blown up" and is doing numbers outside of my own circle. There is now mild discourse around it so I really want to preemptively clarify that my intent was to express frustration at the state of software in general for artists. I'm not trying to shit on your fave OS, most certainly not Linux or FOSS things. I'm also not trying to discourage people from trying different tools, I think they should; I've had a Mac, Windows and Linux system in some form or another for most of my life. As I said at the start of the post I moved my whole workflow to Open Source software which was not an easy feat. I was simply trying to point out that just switching OS isn't an option for so many, no matter how many good reasons you have to the contrary. There will always be barriers to switching and a learning curve.

Nothing is perfect, including me and this post. I was simply trying to express my anxieties from my unique perspective. I don't want to fight anyone, I just want to see better tools for everyone.


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in reply to @lifning's post:

my unrealistically optimistic dream-hope is that some other small creative-type software company ends up feeling the same way Valve did and investing a whole bunch into making a focused productized Linux-thing for whatever their market segment is (and similarly letting the improvements percolate into the rest of the ecosystem) such that we can as a society all free ourselves from needing to continually tame the Mammon Machine to keep our magics. but realistically, uh.. not counting on it.

and like. i'm definitely sitting here exclusively using a buncha computers that're microarchitecturally not even capable of running Windows, but i'm watching so many of my acquaintances starting to reach their breaking points this year. often it's this AI shit, sometimes it's OneDrive installing itself and subsequently deleting some important files, sometimes it's PTSD-insensitive jump-scares on the login screen/start menu. really hoping everyone manages to lock arms and float to safety

I'm thinking about the hundreds of people (at least!) still running XP and 7 on their systems, to the point of modifying programs, hacking ESU licensing, and running outdated software just so they can run something they have any control over.

oh yeah, there were originally loads of win7 holdouts but as time goes on eventually the ones i knew lost out to entropy. definitely believable that there's at least hundreds still at it though. hell, i bet there's even people running 2000 in current year

it feels like even if we accept the "consumer Windows toggles its goodness with each generation" meme (i.e. the belief that "3.1 good, 95 bad, 98 good, ME bad, XP good, vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 10 good, 11 bad"), the acceleration of decay has been so 📉 in the past two dips that even 10 feels like an uneasy compromise

Yeah I use Linux for server stuff and what not and even have it on my laptops but my main computer I use for everything from music production to illustration I have sunk a lot of money and time into developing my workflow. It’s windows 10 and I can’t upgrade to 11 because of some hardware requirements bullshit.

I’m not just gonna give up cubase 11 pro or anything it’s the best DAW on the market and cost a lot of money. Then there’s the countless plugins I use, some are even no longer under development and I had to use a program called jbridge to keep using them when 32bit died out.

In some magical world I could get this all working on Linux and be happy but it’s just not possible at this point, and who knows if my audio interface would even work on Debian or something.

in reply to @MewMus's post:

the thing that sucks the most for me personally is losing FL studio when i switched to linux. the most recent versions are straight up unusable through WINE and the latest one that works semi-decently that i can get ahold of is missing both support for a plugin i really need and a lot of qol features that have become integral to my workflow. i’ve basically given up entirely on music production being realistic for me anymore unless i ever get around to partitioning off part of my drive for a windows install
despite being ostensibly the best option linux isn’t a magically perfect operating system without flaw like i naively sort of believed while i was switching. then again, even after being faced with the reality of linux, i am 100% glad i switched and don’t regret it, and feel a lot more comfortable using my own damn computer, especially considering how windows seems to be becoming even more disgustingly terrible than it was last time i checked

Oh yeah, music and video production are two of the worst offenders for not being in a professional shape on Linux atm

I thankfully only compose small little things for my games that I can get away with using LMMS and FamiStudio. But from my understanding most modern VSTs don't work on Linux and REAPER is the only modern DAW that works with full function

As you said though, the other benefits are too great to go back to windows. But it's a massive downer that with things as they are atm, Linux gets in the way of a lot of creative workflows

i have a lot of fun editing small things in kdenlive, which works fine for most of my purposes, but i’ve always wanted to try expanding my horizons with more complex video editing and it feels like my two options are bite the bullet and also edit on windows for after effects/whatever premier does that i would need to go back to it specifically for, or try to use fucking blender of all things for vfx (which i cannot imagine ever going well, or at the least, being very transferrable, when it comes to 2d stuff)

reaper does work fine for seemingly everything but actually making music, which is the part that seems to particularly suck ass. i didn’t know about the VSTs which is just further incentive for me to make that partition bc jesus christ. i am glad that lmms and famistudio work for you and your purposes though (i’ve been considering trying out trackers for old yamaha sound chips to try and capture that sega genesis/PC-98 feel and get better at composing by actually finishing some damn songs lmao)

but yeah being a creative on linux is pretty tough rn, especially swapping from proprietary software. i am glad that the things that do work work really well, but for a lot of us, especially the ones that dip our toes into a lot of different things, it can leave a big dent in our workflow when we just can’t use the software we know best, especially when there isn’t much in the way of replacements

pretty much every VST that doesn't have a dedicated .exe installer works for me! (this is pretty big though since Serum is a no-go) i use yabridge which converts pretty much any VST into a linux workable format. i've had no hiccups,,,, so far.

it's one of those things where, yeah there might be some wine bullshit i can try to make it work but i'd be entirely too lazy to instead of just, learning how to use an alternative. thankfully i could try out Vital or Surge pretty easily since I never used Serum in the first place :3

i see your notifs have been blasted about this thread too 😅 thankfully most of what i've been seeing has been at least some amount of optimistic... (and i forgot to post earlier but i'm quite interested in that eventual post of how the switch from Win/CSP to Lin/Krita was for you, if that ever comes into being!)

Yeah, it's almost all positive, I'm just like not used to being at the center of all this stuff! I'm only a dork that likes computers but has a lot of friends that don't like them :eggbug-nervous:

I'm taking my time to really push the stress points of everything to know if what I have are genuine complaints or just teething issues as I learn and adapt. Cool to hear that people are looking forward to hearing about it though! :eggbug-shocked: