On Operating Systems
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
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.
Moose
Munchin and Musing
Posted: 12/27/24
I agree with a lot of the above. It really sums up my sort of feelings on the different operating systems. Personally I'm really worried about the Ai getting pushed into every operating system. I was hoping for Apple to kind of hold off on it, but with their Apple Intelligence I guess not. I'm looking into switching to Linux (probably Ubuntu or SteamOS if that's released) myself soon, but I need to get some infrastructure figured out. I have some things that have to be backed up, but the software I use does not work on Linux. So I need to think about putting together a Windows computer to use for storage just to back up important things.
I know personally what I'm most worried about is gaming. I know with the Steam Deck, Valve really made it a lot more accessible to game on linux. But.... I'm worried there are still going to be games that won't run, or need a lot of tweaking.