Linux has made significant strides, and in 2023, it’s better than ever. However, there are still individuals perpetuating a delusion: that desktop Linux is as user-friendly and productive as its mainstream counterparts. After a few discussions on Lemmy, I believe it’s important to provide a clear review of where Linux falls short as a daily driver for average users.
EDIT: can I just make it clear I don’t agree with this article one bit and think it’s an unhinged polemic?
This is a reason, but it has nothing to do with alternatives. It would still hold true if you have 8 gimp and one photoshop users
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If you want more people to use your app, then more people have to be using your app. Simple as.
Well yeah, we are talking about what causes adoption. You have to incentivize people. Maybe it’s cost. Maybe it’s feature sets. Maybe it’s being FOSS. The point is people don’t change their professional software lightly. Production houses even less so.
The problem with this is that GIMP doesn’t aim, or have the funding to be more than just a Photoshop clone, so at best it will be as good as PS but for free. That won’t help you convince people already making money from their work using PS, but maybe given enough time and some advertisement people who are new to image manipulation will start learning how to use GIMP instead of Photoshop.
GIMP’s problem - and most FOSS media production tools face this issue - is that it is always years behind Adobe’s offerings. The gap is very wide the moment you go from hobbyist to even part-time professional. Day to day users who just need to cut a video around or touch up a photo are generally going to be happy.
Make no mistake, I do not like Adobe as a company. I only use Premiere and Photoshop/Lightroom because my company pays for it. But the fact is Adobe is years ahead. GIMP will never have the AI-integration/automatic tools that Adobe has been building out either. Go use Adobe’s audio enhance tool or auto-transcription and be amazed. Truly. They are remarkable tools I only dreamed of even 5 years ago. Your Hindenburgs and GIMPs of the world are just not going to match that any time soon. These developers do not have that kind of capacity.
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I had another section about GIMP having to play catch up with Photoshop for eternity because of low funding (compared to PS), but I deleted it. And yeah this is another thing: GIMP will always be behind if it doesn’t have professional users who are willing to donate, and professional users will not use GIMP unless it stops lagging behind. additionally even professional users of GIMP may not donate, because they are not forced to. So even if GIMP gains a lot of users, it may still be underfunded.
Absolutely. GIMP needs to reshape itself more in to Reaper’s image. Reaper has slowly expanded its reach among freelancers in particular as a powerful DAW because of their “pay when you’re committed” model. They’re actually a (albeit minor) competitor to Adobe Audition. I feel comfortable recommending it to professionals.
That’s kind of hard to do when your software is open source and distributed on every Linux distro’s repos. Someone will fork it as soon as this happens and at the same time FOSS enthusiasts will not be happy with it, and GIMP will lose most (if not all) of it’s donations.
Wrong: this is the only thing that matters, the rest is wishful thinking and delusions.
So, if you are in a company that uses Gimp, and you want to use PS, it is still gimp’s fault that this will not work?
I guess it depends on how likely that company interacts with external people who use PS. The problem is that PS is the industry’s standard and if you go against it and things break your fault.
Windows is an industry standard. And so is office. As long as we treat it as such. If we want things to change we have to go against such standards.
The big difference between Office and Photoshop is: Microsoft opened their file format. And has support for open standards.
Adobe locked their eco system down to build a monopoly. This is not gimps fault. It is 100% on Adobe.
While the outcome is the same, I would love to see a different wording: nothing is an alternative to Photoshop, because Adobe has a monopoly.
Even with an open format MS Office and LibreOffice and others have compatibility issues. Microsoft keeps certain features kind of exclusive to their solution and then there’s the bigger picture called the Microsoft ecosystem. They are now very focused on that and that’s really hard to beat.
This is true. But in reality, it still works.
And yes, the expansion of their Ecosystem is an issue. But to be honest: the cloud version works, and if I get a docx that is broken in Libreoffice, I use 365. At least I have this option.
It’s a complicated topic with no real solution
The only real solution was to get something like Wine or some type of virtualization working better. We will never be able to beat Microsoft, their formats and ecosystem the alternatives will always lag behind in features and the web version isn’t feasible for everything and everyone.
There is one alternative: anti monopoly legislation. Maybe, some day, if the EU gets their heads out of their asses, throw their privacy braking chat monitor out of the window, and start thinking again. In 30-40 years maybe