Btw, I also almost only use my keyboard together with dolphin. It’s quite nice to navigate through directories with “type name -> Enter -> type name -> Enter” etc. 
I’m pretty sure GNU/Linux Mint + Wine is capable of running Adobe Photoshop.
EDIT: Here’s a video showing off Adobe Photoshop in action on GNU/Linux Mint. This video isn’t the newest, but I’m also pretty sure that the newer versions of Adobe Photoshop can run on Mint as well.
- Jev
LinuxMint > all.
Its Ubuntu with a lot of codecs and stuff preinstalled.
Also since I think the Unity UI sucks ass, the LinuxMint ones are nice.
Adobe stuff is the reason that people dont use Linux more.
I need Premiere, After Effect, Photoshop, Audition and stuff
SOMETIMES, SOME version work SOMEWHAT on wine, but its pathetic. Especially Premiere and video editing, forget about it.
The GIMP?
I have tried CentOS and liked it. Although I manually install the JDK and Eclipse because the package manager only has OpenJDK. You also should manually install ANT since if you install it with the package manager it will also install OpenJDK.
When you want to run software made by others, use the repos for runtime libraries such as JRE or Ruby or Python.
When you are developing your own software, you should usually have your own JDK/Ruby/Python environment setup outside the Linux repos. You can use the exact version/config you want and not interfere or be intered with by the repo system.
Definitely check out GIMP
Anyways, ARCH FOR THE WIN. I’ve used lots of different distros, but arch is by far my favorite. Gnome works flawlessly with it, though lately I’m liking LXDE just because it uses less resources. The default file manager for Gnome, nautilus, works fine for me even though it could be faster. Never checked out Dolphin so I suppose that’s what I’m doing soon.
I dropped Eclipse and it’s slow ass a while ago for IntelliJ. It just seems much more customizable and sleek, and not to mention faster. The startup up time is very slow but that’s no problem for me, because once it does start it integrates perfectly into my monitor setup. The GLSL support plugin is very nice as well.
+1 for Arch.
You don’t get crap unless you install it.
Cygwin64. The only iffiy thing is when you’re mixing and matching cygwin vs. non-cygwin app with symbolic links. And that might have been fixed.
If you’re spending more that statistically zero percent of your time install stuff on any OS…rethink your workflow.
End user think. So Dash doesn’t show me a bunch of crap if I type something in it? I must be confused.
Yay the Amiga
Directory Opus still exists by the way, only on PC nowadays. New versions come out quite frequently. It must be one of the most persistent programs ever.
Agreed, Arch is “the best” in my experience. But I don’t install Linux outside of VirtualBox nowadays, so I wouldn’t know how it holds up when you install it as the main OS.
I realise I am discussing this with someone thoroughly converted to Linux, but I have to maybe offer my viewpoint at least:
I like the Linux shell, it’s pretty nifty indeed, but I’d much rather not need to use it when I’m just monkeying around finding files and moving a few around and so on. I definitely don’t ever want to have to touch it to do anything mundane like change any settings for something or install something.
[quote]- Repos: A large base of software is available through the repo system which just makes installation much simpler. None of the headaches associated with Mac/Windows installers.
[/quote]
I have not once ever encountered any trouble whatsoever installing Windows software, so I’m not really sure what you mean. I just double click … click a few “Nexts” and it’s done. The rare times it doesn’t work are when Windows tries to do something like Linux, ie. Windows update. That frequently barfs with obscure error codes.
[quote]- Clean and hyper customizable: None of the crap that Apple/Microsoft and various peripheral vendors want to put on your system. Linux is ideal if you like a lean, clean, elegant system. The GUI is minimal and that’s great.
[/quote]
Clean I like; customisable I don’t. Why is that? Because I like stuff to be right straight away. My Windows desktop has a single customisation: a magnified mouse. The reason is that I don’t like to feel uncomfortable when I use another system; if it’s all at defaults, I don’t need to adjust anything to feel right at home.
I mean the decoration and widgetry surrounding the window manager really. Two things I detest about Linux desktops:
- Resizing window borders appear to be 1 pixel thick. The mouse flickers in a terribly ungainly fashion when attempting to hover over a border or corner. It just feels utterly rubbish. I do a vastly better job of it myself just in my game code. Why they aren’t able to get this right beggars belief.
- The systray widget spacing and the widgets themselves; the multiple desktop widget especially. I don’t quite know how they manage to uglify this but it seems as if they aren’t aware of how to lay out UI elements so they don’t just look like a mess.
- Flickering, mysteriously untactile mouse cursor. Not sure quite how but it always feels like it’s lagging and accelerates in just the wrong way. All desktops I’ve tried.
- Don’t get me started on Unity.
4a. Actually I’ll start on Unity. If anyone ever suggests putting the menu back in the top of the screen again, hang them by the foreskin until they are sorry. Rant over.
4b. Actually resume rant. Scrollbars. WTF. After your foreskin ordeal I will roast what remains of your genitals with a small candle for a number of hours. - The Windows start bar with a quick launch section is probably the most useful piece of desktop functionality I’ve used in all OSes, ever. The one in Win7 is actually brilliant now you can drag the tasks to rearrange, and stack them. Quick preview is useless though, as is pinning.
Not “a Windows user”, just “an ordinary user”. Like me. I do commandline and batching… but I prefer not to.
Then for the sake of all things sensible why does the window manager not simply have a widget on the windows that does that instead of forcing everything to??
Cas
^this, I don’t want to type in a long path name and misspell a single character. I like a GUI (that is keyboard navigable) that I can navigate files and folders with.
Also, I’ve noticed the same strange mouse behaviors on all linux distros I’ve tried, feels very sloppy.
I’ve thought about dual booting linux before, but it’s just too much hassle. Sure everything is customizable, but I don’t want to spend a week trying to find all the configuration files and understanding all their different formats just to get my system working as smoothly as a default windows installation :cranky:
I think most (all?) window managers support resizing by Alt-RMB anywhere in the window.
For the most part though, it mostly comes down to a matter of familiarity. I feel like I can’t do much whenever I’m confronted with a different OS: I switched over to linux back in 2000-2001 - OSX is ok (got acquainted with it last summer),b ut windows is just unbearably obtuse from my pov.
I’ve used cygwin. I’ve used msys bash shell on Windows much more heavily. It’s distantly inferior to Linux/Mac. First, all Windows GUI apps use “C:\dir\path\file.txt” while the shell uses “/C/dir/path/file.txt” so you have to usually manually convert between the two notations.
I just installed virtualbox yesterday… I frequently discover, install new programs, and more frequently patch existing ones. This is a legitimate benefit.
Many Windows apps also use their own custom update/patch system or require manual patching which are both headaches. Much easier on Linux.
Linux isn’t perfect, Dash is mildly annoying, but in general, there is much less screen noise in normal Linux usage.
Linux shells have advanced tab completion, tab preview, and wildcard features so that users do not “type in a long path name and misspell a single character”.
Every major Linux does have a GUI file browser. Even I use that from time to time. It’s nothing amazing, but it does all the basic stuff…
I have never seen “strange mouse behaviors” on any Linux system I’ve used in the past five years. This isn’t a real issue.
All the basics should work right off the bat.
You should do the obvious config stuff: install your favorite apps. Load up your launcher bar. Pick your favorite web browser. Install all your favorite IDEs and dev tools…
You shouldn’t need to learn any esoteric config files.
You are right, I forgot about tab completion, that does solve my issue of mistyping stuff. I agree, user’s should have to learn config file formats, but depending on the distro and your preferences, I’ve found that application menus don’t always contain the options I’m looking for, so I can only assume that the advanced settings are in some config file somewhere.
I don’t know that it’s not a real issue, princec mentioned it and I’ve seen it. It may not be a universal issue, but it is real. It might be a graphics driver issue, idk, which is another thing Linux doesn’t tend to have great support for. The shell has always been smooth in my experience (better than a windows shell), but distros with desktops tend to be far more laggy than Windows :clue:
I’ve not used a single Linux distro where the mouse was slick. Dunno what it is. Maybe they (the people who work on it) are so used to it they’re not aware that it could be a lot better.
I’m hoping Steam starts piling the pressure on the video and audio driver issues.
Cas
[quote]I’ve not used a single Linux distro where the mouse was slick. Dunno what it is. Maybe they (the people who work on it) are so used to it they’re not aware that it could be a lot better.
[/quote]
To be honest, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. The mouse in Linux seems pretty much lag-free to me. I use windows more than Linux (because of work), but my GUI annoyances are pretty consistently with Windows.
But I always have the feeling that I have to click a lot more on Windows; places where I need to be either just require lots more clicking to get to, or are for some reason not responding to the mouse at all without clicking on them first. Stuff like that. Things that make Windows feel quite stiff and cumbersome to me.
Could it be that you’ve been unlucky with driver issues, while I’ve just been lucky there?
Define “distantly inferior”. In what way? Same source compiled with the same compiler…the only difference is the POSIX glue services. The filesystem differences are pretty much: so what? It’s true if you directly launch something like bash in cygwin you’re not going to get what you expect in terms of GUI, but that’s because it’s a console app so it’s limited by its launching GUI app…in this case command.com. Which we all can agree blows chunks. So don’t do that and launch in it emacs instead if you plan on doing any serious work.
There’s no such animal as a “linux shell”. There are POSIX shells and there are UNIX shells. Linux is a kernel…virtually all the end-user tools are either POSIX or UNIX.
The distinction blurs in the minds of many…
… Arch sounds like an interesting concept, though I have my beady eye on an exercise in self-flagellation called “Linux From Scratch”.
Cas
I’m doing quite a bit of work on a Windows VM and I’ve installed msys Git + Bash. Define “distantly inferior”:
- The GUI window for the shell is all crappy and cmd.exe style. To resize the shell window, I have to right click -> props and futz with GUI settings.
- all the main things work: grep works, ls works, find works. but it’s less integrated into the rest of the OS. I mentioned the hassle in copy/pasting paths. But Linux is fundamentally designed around a shell something like a bash shell, in Windows it’s a foreign transplant. I haven’t tried to use Bash more seriously on Windows to articulate more specific details. If I did, I probably would try cygwin instead of msys bash and I would try soft links, which I know exist on Windows with NTFS.
You are pedantic, but right. Most people call casually call bash a Linux shell because it is a common default, but you are more technically specific.