you forgot paint shop pro! but yeah you illustrate a good point; gimp is at least 10 years behind adobe/affinity/photopea. i’m honestly not sure if the things i need can be done in gimp because tutorial content is few and far between. there are probably no comparison videos because few professionals if any are willing to stick around gimp long enough to master it on such a level that they could put together a video that is honest or correct, and they would probably not want to make a video showing how gimp is crap as that is usually the opposite of a goal post here; i mean, absolutely no one likes Adobe and mostly everyone actually wish gimp was a replacement that could become a new industry standard because fuck Adobe.

i think professionals just aren’t the target demography for the gimp contributors.

no he’s definitely right. there is a reason affinity suit has been successful and it isn’t because its commercially available, it’s because it actually works as an adobe replacement whereas gimp, inkacape, scribus - does not, and its largely because of UI.

now that affinity has sold to canva and shut down sale and there is a clear concern over the future of affinity, people won’t be moving to gimp, which has had what, two decades to fix their stuff? no, they’ll be moving to photopea, again, for the same reasons. graphite.rs likewise is more at odds of potentially replacing illustrator/designer than inkscape has managed for over a decade.

i hate that i can’t use gimp, inkacape, and scribus professionally. and not for a lack of trying, giving them a few months every few years. but, its what it is.

i hope gimp becomes great one day.

starlite runs the n100 and n200 cpus. the cpus are pretty great (have an n100 on my nuc). the problem with linux is the touch interface first and foremost imo. i have an old windows tablet converted to linux and its a daily headache. well, was. i haven’t used the thing for months.

you could account share? most services banned account sharing last year afaik.

and anyway; how is it a bad thing to reject predatory services?

piracy wad literally always a service problem. they solved it by netflix monopoly providing a great service people wanted and piracy was practically dead for an entire decade - then they all got greedy and we’re all headed back to piracy.

the solution here seems pretty obvious, and i think even the execs are aware of it.

the legion of shills all but disappeared about 3 months in. i guess their budget ran out. but at least we stopped getting the anti-fedi pro-bluesky spam here at the fediverse so i don’t care anymore if its alive or not. mastodon is the only social media i use today not counting aggregation portals like lemmy.

i tried this approach but those channels died. discord rarely works long-term from what i’ve seen. you see the activity and if its far too long since someone engaged with the channel then its dead basically - and you have to start a new server; but forget getting non-gamers to put in the effort of joining a new server.

as an example, i’m an aquarist who focus on developing specific traits - being out of the loop basically means no access to shows, international exchange meetings, local swaps, events and would also set me back 10-20 years on potential development by trying to reinvent the wheel or even likely to fail in such attempts as well as an inability to acquire quality stock to revitalize genes in housed populations.

being out of the loop in this context is equivalent of quitting because its just impossible to do without facebook because these assholes all decided to move their social activity there.

how do you keep up with local/town newd, club information and activities? all of mine post exclusively on the fb groups and since i deleted my account i’m out of the loop on everything lol.

i assume the problem with league of legends since last year is because they switched to kernel level anticheat then? would be nice if they get kicked in the face for the anti-linux decision they made so we can start playing again :P

incorrect. currently sporting an ideapad pro that i bought directly from lenovo last year and it came without windows pre-installed.

GIMP etc are not developed by the target consumers is the real problem. affinity exists literally to capitalize on adobe going subscription and their entire effort has been to basically make adobe-but-better at a reasonable end user cost to convert users. As a professional designer, I have successfully migrated to Affinity after years of waiting for GIMP and others to match adobe offering. Even now, I would still use Photopea over GIMP. If one guy can make Photopea in his spare time, then what is stopping the GIMP team from doing the same while being paid? I’ll tell you; because they have no idea what a professional actually needs.

If there was a Publisher (InDesign) and Designer (Illustrator) equivalent just like Photopea - my life would be infinitely better because I’ve long since given up hope on Inkscape etc. I could finally breathe as i leave Windows forever. Sadly, best the world is willing to give me is fucking canva, and now those assholes own Affinity - so in the end, i’m still stuck between a rock and a hard place/

it seems like every government (and its citizens) in Europe can’t imagine being without: Microsoft services Google services Meta services Apple services

I’ve written a few articles in LibreOffice and the things I need to be able to do just can’t be done in order to follow the structure of the zine I was writing for. It’s a hobby zine and the work is free by everyone so they just reformatted it for me; but it still inconveniences others when things aren’t within a certain expected standard. I do blame microsoft for it though; all office apps uses the same standard except microsoft, unfortunately all the users uses microsoft office…

and no, krita, inkscape, gimp, etc. can’t replace Affinity. Affinity itself could barely replace Adobe in their first place. but it still has, for many. so it’s not a learning issue. Affinity is more intuitive than Adobe, so in this case Adobe is just outdated.

but as for the open source, the issue is more than just a lack of features. The UI is at least 15 years out of date.

Professionally the software just isn’t there; and it’s a real shame too, because I feel very uncomfortable using ANY microsoft products (on principle). But as far as Photoshop goes, there is photopea which is a great free browser based clone. Sadly there is no illustrator or indesign browser based clones that can match the quality of photopea, and the only desktop apps up for the job of matching Adobe is currently the Affinity Suite.

Affinity is a one-time fee at around 80€ for a Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator clone that sprang unto existence literally to combat Adobe subscriptions. Except since using Affinity exclusively for a year now, it feels better than Adobe ever did. Much more modern. Only missing a rare few of features that have work-arounds.

But, as OP says. Linux support is sorely missed. Because it’s much smaller than adobe there is a lack of community effort to get it to run on linux and if you manage to make it run, it craps out on you.

Since I work professionally with digital art and print, Krita, GIMP, etc. are sadly nowhere closer viable options (I have tried). Unfortunately I had to give up and install Windows last week solely to run Affinity properly, all other software that I use for work runs smoothly in linux, and like 95% of my preferred games (I too refuse to pay a subscription on principle).

there is a ton of famous people active on Mastodon tho. George Takei. John Scalzi. James Gunn. Cory Doctorow. Charlie Stross. William Gibson. Ron Gilbert.

Some left a year ago tho, probably for BlueSky, like Linus Torvald, Stephen Fry, Mark Ruffalo, Greta Thunberg, Felicia Day, etc.

A bunch of official european channels too like the european commission.

I fell out of an aeroplane with no parachute and lived.

Imagine if the airplane was actually in mid flight tho!

i setup my old job with linux internally. never had issues. day i quit boss told me to install windows so he can find a replacement employee. sure.

3 years later. boss wants me back. they’ve had nothing but problems. but i’m not allowed to install linux again.

he says, “if windows didn’t have so many problems you would be out of a job.”

my boss told me today if we moved to literally any non-microsoft platform or software, i’d be out of a job.

and he’s right. most of us only have careers because microsoft can’t push out a software that’s more than barebone functional - and everyone use them even if there are far superior alternatives out there literally only because of familiarity.

i’m not planning to stop giving microsoft shit of course. they should be criminally prosecuted over their exchange service even and how it’s blacklisting competitors to force businesses onto the platform a la microsoft classic tactics. but eh.

just like how people keep complaining about facebook groups.

they uprooted every community and hobby discussion board ever and move them to a platform that doesn’t support distribution of information then moan that it’s just spam and repeated engagement content.