I get that government use needs to be stringently tested for security, and so things take a little longer. But really, there are PLENTY of good FOSS products in existence that can be used as a base framework and a head-start to things like this.

You don’t have to re-invent the wheel when you could easily fork Jitsi-meet and harden it/secure it to your needs in the government.

Jitsi is one of my top 5 FOSS projects that are basically already mature enough to be used in a professional setting

Yes.

After god knows how many years now of being on Linux exclusively, I tend to look at the terminal (commands in general) as a convenience more than a necessity. Meaning that in a lot of cases, knowing a command and quickly typing it to start an update (for example) is just faster and easier than pulling up the GUI every time.

Cool. Thanks for the info. I must have been on the Flatpak for so long that I just never noticed.

Which version of the plugin did you install. There’s a whole bunch of them when you type flatpak install gimp. The resynthesizer version that works with gimp3 flatpak is number 20 in my screenshot. The one that has the 3

Not sure. I’d assume its the same as the flatpak with a bit more work involved in deconstructing the apk file, adding the plugin to the proper folder and then recompiling.

Unless this has been fixed in newer versions, it should be pointed out that ReSynthesizer relies on an older version of Python that most distrobutions don’t have anymore, so unless your using the flatpak, which has all of those dependencies still built in, it won’t work.

Oh shit! That’s what we were missing all along! That’s what has, all this time, been keeping adoption down and preventing the year of the linux desktop! A condescending prick talking down to people! We should have figured this out a long time ago! Thanks OP for setting us straight! Now our numbers are sure to skyrocket!

At it’s heart, Krita is a drawing program with a few concessions to photo editing/manipulation. Whereas Gimp is a photo editing software with a few concessions to drawing.

Unless Krita decides to go the full adobe route and try to do both (which I doubt will ever happen), a feature like setting a white point (or any feature that isn’t solely useful for photography but not drawing) will ever be in it.

People making the comparison as though Gimp and Krita are both trying to do the same thing are utterly exhausting.

Optimized Repositories for Cachy only have any real effect on newer processors (x86-64-v3 and up). Of course I can still use it on an older machine, but I was asking if my processor (AMD A10 “kaveri”) would be new enough to take advantage of those optimized repositories. (my research so far says no…AMD didn’t add v3 until the next years processors in 2015)

You’re link actually answered my question, though. So thanks! Don’t know why when I searched it wasn’t finding that page for myself. Maybe my Google-fu needs some retraining.

That’s another option as well. It’s between Endeavour, Cachy, or sticking with Manjaro.

Usually my primary consideration is community size and/or team size. Too many linux distributions seem great, but have low support and eventually just vanish, so I always try to stick to the “bigger boys”. Not saying Endeavour is that, but once upon a time it was the new guy on the block and that’s why I’ve waited to consider it. Same with Cachy. I wait to see if they’ve proven their staying power before considering them.

And rightly so!

Just remember folks…if it’s not open source, and you’re not paying for the product, then you ARE the product. Likely a tracking nightmare.

Thunderbird

Using the word “irregardless” disqualifies you from any job, anyway. So shouldn’t really matter to you.

Is this satire?

Seriously, if I was new to Linux, coming from Windows, asking for a cheat sheet or Linux for dummies manual, everything you wrote would sound like absolute gibberish to me.

If this was someone’s response to me when asking for advice I’d immediately reinstall windows where at least (from the perspective of a typical end user) they speak words that make sense.

The final “Gate” so to speak, will end up being your motherboard.

At a certain point, your motherboard just won’t support a newer part and you’ll have upgraded all the existing parts as far as they can go.

My current rig that I’m still perfectly content with is just under ten years old. I’ve upgraded the Ram to as much as the motherboard will allow. I’ve upgraded the Video Card two or three times in that span, where it’s now running a 3060. While I still see a huge improvement with that, there’s no doubt that the video card is being throttled somewhat by the motherboard throughput limitations, but for I don’t mind. I’ve added extra cooling fans, replaced the drives with SSD and use the old metal spinners for extra storage.

It still runs plenty fast enough to do Blender (nothing complex, just airplane modelling and animation for xplane), video editing with DaVinci Resolve (as long as I use proxy clips and take it a little easy on the motion graphics), and most newer games (though of course not at ultra settings).

The last bottleneck that I’ll simply never be able to pass is the fact that the CPU socket will never support an octocore processor or higher. I can upgrade as much as I want, but it will never not be a quad-core.

For now that’s fine. But that’s the hard limit that I’ve given myself. Your mileage may vary.

anything I’ve ever removed with ( flatpak remove --unused ) has not re-appeared again. Not that I’ve noticed anyway.

In terms of how you interact with it day to day, no. And that’s because the Distro in that sense matters less than the desktop environment. Since DEs are fundamentally distro agnostic, most distros give a person the option for multiple choices in that regard, so it doesn’t really matter if you’re using Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, etc… what matters from a usage perspective is if you’re using KDE, or Gnome, or XFCE, etc…

Under the hood there’s a lot of differences in how each one chooses to do things, but I wouldn’t call one of them better or worse than any other and for the most part can be ignored.

My advice would be narrow it down to one choice; and that’s your package manager. That’s really where most of the difference lies. Find the one that you find easiest to use (Apt, Pacman/Pamac, DNF, Zypper) and that’s where you land until you’re comfortable.

GIMP for example is nowhere near feature parity with Photoshop

Yeah. That’s exactly my point…maybe I wasn’t clear.

The problem is that no one specific FOSS tool has feature parity. To get the same abilities as Photoshop, you have to use a workflow that is a combination of GIMP, Inkscape, Krita and Scribus instead of having it in the one package, which is why Adobe is the industry standard.

Anybody who says Inkscape is a replacement for Illustrator simply does not use it in any serious professional capacity. It doesn’t even have any means of adding paragraph spacing!

That’s sort of where I see the issue as well. What proprietary software does is takes the features of a bunch of different pieces of kit and puts them together into one package.

There isn’t one particular thing that Propietary software does the FOSS software can’t. The problem is that you need multiple different software solutions to do it.

So while Illustrator offers Paragraph Spacing (for example) Inkscape doesn’t, you get that in Scribus. But Scribus lacks the more advanced pathing vector tools, which Inkscape offers. Meanwhile neither of them have strong photo editing abilities, which GIMP brings to the table, but GIMP can’t really do painting well, which KRITA brings to the table…and so on and so on.

Every open source alternative does something as good as their proprietary alternaties. But not everything. You have to use a combination in order to match the capability of one adobe product, and that’s just not feasible in a professional environment.