I’m actively trying to switch to Linux, so it’s not from a lack of effort.
The main two reasons are Photoshop and scanning. I’m a photographer, and I’m scanning and restoring old photos of the family. There’s no decent alternative to Photoshop, especially now that it has the neural filters, so editing and colouring photos is in a different league.
As far as scanning goes, I was getting better results in Windows 20 years ago. I’ve got an Epson scanner, and the software can automatically crop, as well as restore the colour balance of a photo. Using Linux, I was lucky to get more than a dodgy .bmp through an interface that would have looked clunky in the 90s. I could open it in GIMP, but then couldn’t save as a jpeg without either exporting the file or installing addons.
On top of problems like these, there are issues that crop up because of an apparent need to be different to Windows.
My Xubuntu server won’t let me resize windows unless I grab the top left corner. Any other edge of the window is apparently half a pixel thick, and too small for my mouse to register.
Smooth scrolling by clicking the mouse wheel has been replaced with the paste command, as if pasting into a browser window is something that people do dozens of times a day.
Mint’s settings window constantly resizes itself, no matter what I set it to. I can resize it, open a setting then click back, and it’s back to the default size again!
The universal paste keyboard shortcut, ctrl & v only works in some programs. Others need shift, ctrl, and v!
Silly little things like this spoil my workflow and take me out of what I’m doing. They’re the minor annoyances that frustrate people and encourage them to switch back to Windows. Yes, they can probably be changed, but why were they changed in the first place? I could paste with ctrl v in DOS 6.22 and could trust a window not to resize itself in Windows 3.1, long before any modern distro was dreamed up, so why are the basics different?
I’m actively trying to switch to Linux, so it’s not from a lack of effort.
The main two reasons are Photoshop and scanning. I’m a photographer, and I’m scanning and restoring old photos of the family. There’s no decent alternative to Photoshop, especially now that it has the neural filters, so editing and colouring photos is in a different league.
As far as scanning goes, I was getting better results in Windows 20 years ago. I’ve got an Epson scanner, and the software can automatically crop, as well as restore the colour balance of a photo. Using Linux, I was lucky to get more than a dodgy .bmp through an interface that would have looked clunky in the 90s. I could open it in GIMP, but then couldn’t save as a jpeg without either exporting the file or installing addons.
On top of problems like these, there are issues that crop up because of an apparent need to be different to Windows.
My Xubuntu server won’t let me resize windows unless I grab the top left corner. Any other edge of the window is apparently half a pixel thick, and too small for my mouse to register.
Smooth scrolling by clicking the mouse wheel has been replaced with the paste command, as if pasting into a browser window is something that people do dozens of times a day.
Mint’s settings window constantly resizes itself, no matter what I set it to. I can resize it, open a setting then click back, and it’s back to the default size again!
The universal paste keyboard shortcut, ctrl & v only works in some programs. Others need shift, ctrl, and v!
Silly little things like this spoil my workflow and take me out of what I’m doing. They’re the minor annoyances that frustrate people and encourage them to switch back to Windows. Yes, they can probably be changed, but why were they changed in the first place? I could paste with ctrl v in DOS 6.22 and could trust a window not to resize itself in Windows 3.1, long before any modern distro was dreamed up, so why are the basics different?