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.

If you wan’t to use FOSS I get it, I want to. But when it comes to professionnal workflow you sometimes have to put your ego on the side. When I tried to ditch the Adobe Suite, the Free(dom) alternatives didn’t worked for me or the proprietary alternatives were simply better.

Then, I would argue, the alternative isn’t to sign petitions to make the corporate guys make their proprietary stuff available on FOSS operating systems. The alternative is to contribute to the FOSS alternatives in order to make them as good as the proprietary.

I’m not saying that you in particular haven’t contributed (either financially or developmentally). I don’t know you, so this isn’t particularly directed at you.

But in general, the “FOSS isn’t as good as proprietary stuff” crowd has overwhelmingly never actually tried to fund or contribute to the development of the software itself and their complaints amount to “Why isn’t my free thing as good as the thing they make me pay for?”

In which case the answer is “of course it isn’t…you’re telling me the software developed on the evenings and weekends by enthusiasts doing it in the spare time for NO money isn’t as polished as a fully funded business software!? NO WAY!!! I’M SHOOKETH!!!”

The alternative to the (perceived) quality disparity between FOSS and Proprietary isn’t to go begging at the Corporations doorstep; it’s to make the FOSS alternatives good enough to take the throne of “industry standard” away from the corporations.

It’s not impossible…hell, Blender is the poster child for pretty much doing exactly that. It’s not the “industry standard”, but it’s accepted in the industry in ways that GIMP and Inkscape still aren’t. And the reason is because it’s good enough to be there.

Depends on what you’re using it for.

Writer, Presentation, etc… yeah. works great. No problems at all.

Calc/Excel…sure…will work for pretty basic stuff. But as soon as you get a relatively complex spreadsheet, interoperability goes out the window.

For example, I have a few spreadsheets that I work on at home (where I use Linux) and at work (where I use windows). I can’t work on it in one without screwing up the formatting, forumlae, and advanced filtering in the other, and vice versa. I’m forced to use OnlyOffice in order to be able to do so.

That’s a very fair point. But it’s still annoying.

Not when every app decides to use a different point version of the same damn platform.

"Hello Mr. Application. I see you’d like to use the Freedesktop-SDK 23.08.27

“Oh…well hello other application. What’s this? You want to use Freedesktop-SDK 24.08.10? Well…I guess so…”

Edited to add: Yes, I know that flatpaks will upgrade to use updated platforms. But it doesn’t automatically remove the old one, forcing you to have to run flatpak remove --unused every week just to keep your drive clean. That’s hardly user friendly for the average person.

I don’t mind flatpaks in a pinch, but having to use them for literally every app on my computer is an unreasonable amount of bloat.

Lato, League Spartan, League Gothic are my three most used fonts by a wide margin. Lato and its variety of weights for most things, League when I am doing design work and need a cleaner title or header.

Lately ive been weirdly taken with TT2020 Style G, which is an odd name for a no-name font that replicates an old imperfect typewriter. For whatever reason, switching my writing software to that (Manuscript) suddenly fired up my writing flow.

neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet

I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I’d add that they’re not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.

The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that’s never been the goal of either program.

Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it’s now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that’s never been the goal of any of those programs. They’re separate kit and as far as I’m aware always will be.

Inkscape: Completely capable. I know many people who have used it instead of illustrator professionally for years.

GIMP: Depends on you. As someone who learned GIMP long before ever learning Photoshop, I find Photoshop unintuitive and frankly stupid. So it’s all about what you learned on. But GIMP relies on spending a few minutes setting it up for your own use case. Literally every window can be moved to anywhere. You can have whatever windows you want open all the time, or hidden behind right clicks, etc… Your tabs and tab groups are completely customizable to how you want to work. BUT the rub is that you have to be interested in doing that. GIMP is trashed for having a bad default UI because the expectation is that it doesn’t have a default UI. My GIMP would look entirely different from someone elses because I use different tools that I want front and centre than someone else might. If you’re not interested in that and just want something that you can learn a “default” setup and go with it (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that) than you’re better off sticking with Photoshop.

As for Krita, whatever else people are telling you, Krita is NOT a replacement for GIMP if you’re doing design work. What it brings to the table in terms of having built in Vector capabilities it negates by having a very limited and basic suite of selection tools. Something that would take you two seconds in PS or Gimp to band select, paint the foreground, feather the selection, shrink it, etc… takes five extra steps in Krita because Krita is a drawing program not a graphic design program; what few “advanced” selection tools they’ve introduced is tacked on and hidden between three or four extra steps because it just wasn’t designed to have them at first and they were added later.

Just because it looks nicer out of the box than Gimp, doesn’t make it better. I’ve tried replacing Gimp with Krita because i like the KDE suite of apps in general. But I was pulling my hair out trying to do even a basic composition using it’s archaic selection tools.