I’m always nervous when hearing about new filesystems since a certain high profile news incident a several years back.

I really, really, really hope that Kent Overstreet has a really good relationship with any partner or spouse he may or may not have.

There are a couple factors that play into future-planning. The first, and most important factor is that most people neither care what OS their hardware uses or actually need more than the barest baseline. They want to spend time with their friends doing the things their friends are doing.

This is what has allowed Android to gain such massive prominence in the mobile space. It’s all that’s needed to play crap web games, listen to music, watch videos, and commune on social media. Expect more and more consumer hardware to be ARM-based devices running Android for the next few years.

The next big factor is that Linux has become a sort of driver dumping ground for reputable hardware manufacturers. Want to sell a piece of hardware? Better make damn sure it’s got Linux driver support so that it can be part of an Android device. This means that more manufacturers are contributing drivers and code to the rest of Linux. It doesn’t necessarily mean that code that works with Linux is going to be open source or play well with others. nvidia has proven to be an absolute bastard in this regard.

I don’t think that means the future for Linux is going to be dim. I do think we need to expect and plan for more corporate presence. Some of that presence will be good. It doesn’t take much to be a good member of the community. However, we do need to keep our collective eyes out for nvidia-like presences that will only serve to anchor everyone else down.

Where I’d personally LIKE to see Linux going is to provide more power to older hardware. We have a wealth of hardware that’s in the 10-20 year-old range that can be doing useful work. The problem there is maintainership. It’s harder to get volunteers to work with older hardware. If you can get people to work on supporting that hardware, it means fewer PCBs in landfills and more doing hobbyist or scientific work.

In the ‘modern’ Desktop Linux space, I’d like to see a renewed focus on privacy. I’d like to see privacy features baked into the kernel alongside security features. In a lot of cases those are the same feature.

Start with Mint or Pop!OS. I’m not familiar with the Surface hardware, but Mint, in particular, seems to make driver handling a breeze. I’m very comfortable recommending Mint to folks new to Linux.

The last version of PS I seriously spent time to try to get working on WINE was CS2, which is now ‘EOL’ according to Adobe. It’s quite a few years old at this point, so things may be different with newer versions.

There are technical issues, which may have changed since, like PS’s scratch file handling. Adobe stuff in general tends (tended) to simply ignore the fact that modern operating systems all do swap files or partitions and do all their own virtual memory. WINE just didn’t work well with this approach, and various memory-related errors were common, especially when working with larger files.

The single biggest issue for me actually working with the painting tools was WINE tended to vomit when PS wanted to display any kind of hardware-accelerated cursor on screen, like for most painting brushes. Selection tools tended to be okay, but my experience was that when you wanted a painting brush, WINE would simply not render what PS was trying to do, even for things as simple as the round brush outline.

The most immediate thing I can’t find on that list that I need and have run into recently is better single-channel editing. For example, by default you can’t just edit a channel’s alpha/transparency. This makes it very difficult for me to do additive masks. There are ways to do this, but they are much more difficult for me.

One I ran into yesterday, and doesn’t seem to be on the list is an inability to edit gradients in a live manner. Clicking ‘Edit this gradient’ brings up the gradient palette, but most of its menu options simply don’t respond.

There are lines in the roadmap list about improving the tool palettes, but nothing pertaining to these issues.

In the past, I’ve attempted to submit feature requests for selection handling, only to have those requests ignored, or in one case being directly told, ‘That’s not something we’re interested in working on or accepting patches for.’ Investigating others’ requests led me to understand that was a very common thing to hear from the GIMP team.

That was about three years ago. I’d LOVE to know that stance has changed, but hearing ‘Yeah, we’ll never do that,’ is the point at which you start looking for other projects to try to use and help with.

I’m… very frustrated with GIMP and its development team. I really badly need a good raster editor and GIMP is just not that editor. The GIMP team tends to discourage suggestions and volunteer work that does not originate from within their group, so I don’t have a lot of hope of that changing.

Photoshop on WINE can be made to work, but it’s a terribly bad solution for many reasons.

I certainly don’t want to recommend either of them the way I do other applications and OSes in my list. Even the ones I mention that have frustrations are things I’m still willing to use (and enjoy) on a daily basis.

LEX writes in another reply:

Dump Gimp. Krita is the way.

Krita is great. It’s not perfect, and doesn’t provide some functionality I personally need. However, the Krita team really does seem intent on improving it and making it a better application, and that shows in its development and featureset. In time, I hope to completely replace anything I have to go back to GIMP or PS for.

Inkscape simply eliminated any dependence I had on other vector editors like Visio or Illustrator. It’s amazingly good. I’m hoping that Krita gets to that same place in the future.

tbh, this was my first post on Lemmy after deciding to dump reddit like the hot garbage it became. When I saw that the post could have an image attachment in addition to the text, this sprang to mind immediately.