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.)
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.
i've been using linux pretty much exclusively for like 20 years. i like it. i think it's good.
windows drives me up the wall. you can't scroll unfocused windows with the mouse wheel. you can't grab and move windows from anywhere by holding the super key. explorer doesn't have tabs. even this handful of things are so fundamental to routine computer use for me that windows feels so clumsy as to be nearly unusable.
i imagine windows users reading this are currently thinking "what the hell are you talking about, just drag the title bar, it's not hard".
and i think this same thing happens in reverse for windows refugees. you've spent years, even decades, maybe not becoming an expert exactly but still building up a repository of little muscle-memory things: tiny shortcuts to make your life easier, navigation through byzantine dialogs to get a thing you want while the rest becomes invisible, or misfeatures you know to avoid. things that are now second nature.
and then you try linux and none of that stuff works. you are a novice again, in a way you haven't been in so long that you might not even remember what it's like. there's no C: drive, Win-R doesn't work, you don't generally install random stuff you downloaded from websites, and you can turn your desktop into a cube for some reason. so you get this odd situation where every moderately savvy windows user knows that you find your ip address with ipconfig /all, but balks at the idea that the fastest way to do a thing on linux sometimes involves the terminal. (ours is actually good though)
i wonder if a lot of windows users try linux expecting it to be, like... bootleg windows? Windows But Free And Also Without That One Thing I Hate But Otherwise The Same Basically. and i mean yeah it still has programs and files and whatnot. but it... isn't... windows. it's linux.
but windows is a cultural Default. windows is Just How Computers Are. windows is Computers. if something doesn't work on windows, it must be the fault of that thing. linux meanwhile is an outlier, so anything it does is a deviation from the Norm, which is windows. if something doesn't work on linux, it must be the fault of linux. (honestly i have no idea how apple managed to create the illusion that they are an entire parallel universe of computers. i wonder how the discourse would be different if you could just install macos on a computer like a normal operating system, rather than apple treating macs like a kind of console.)
like. if i announced an extremely cool and popular game but then only release it for linux, i expect a bunch of windows users would complain at me. but when twenty billion in annual revenue multinational corporation adobe inc doesn't release photoshop for linux, this is generally framed as a flaw on linux's part — linux "doesn't support" photoshop, rather than the other way around. meanwhile adobe could have a rough linux photoshop build within weeks if they really wanted to.
(even the company that makes clip studio paint brings in 50 million a year. krita runs a kickstarter every few years that makes like half a year's salary for a single developer.)
the existence of wine doesn't help this "bootleg" perception i think. don't get me wrong, wine is very cool (actually it is a fucking miracle and a marvel of software engineering) and good for emergencies, but i fear the steam deck gives the impression that linux is mostly a box for running all your windows software and carrying on like nothing's different. and it isn't that. wine isn't magic. it's chasing multiple moving targets, it can't run everything, and sometimes it will stop working even though it was fine yesterday. i hardly ever use wine and would never use it for some big thing critical to my workflow.
the great irony is that video games might be one of the easiest kinds of things to port/emulate, once the graphics api stuff is taken care of. (seriously i do not understand why directx needs to exist except to make games harder to port off of windows.) they don't do anything else that's platform-specific or deal with gui widgets or any of that; they read input, draw pixels to the screen, and play sound. which makes the situation all the more absurd — it would take very little effort to release linux builds of most non-AAA games, and AAA games could probably be done by one or two people. the doom linux releases were all the effort of one guy at id! i think his name was tim.
what the hell was i talking about.
yeah of course there's a learning curve. it's a different thing. if you expect everything to be exactly the same then you're setting yourself up for frustration out of the gate. probably don't expect clip studio paint to run on linux, any more than you would expect final cut pro to run on windows. maybe it will, because a bunch of people put an astronomical amount of effort into the frankly ridiculous project that is wine and then gave it to you for free. but maybe it won't. and no one can really fix that for good, besides the people who made clip studio paint but decided they don't want to sell you a linux version.
this is part of why casual piracy culture bums me out, too: it makes the generosity of actually free stuff worth nothing. windows is "free", photoshop is "free", fl studio is "free", you can download them all from a website. linux and krita and lmms are also free, so why aren't they as polished or whatever? there are a lot of reasons, but a big one is a funding gap measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
and if you want to get away from the billion-dollar corporation, then your options are necessarily stuff that didn't have a billion dollars spent on it.
