I’d love if something like this existed to make Raw Therapee or Darktable look/work more like Lightroom. I’ve been trying to learn them but the years of time spent in Lightroom is hard to overcome.

FOR REAL. When my Fedora setup gets some system level updates that it would like a reboot for (kernel etc), it takes maybe 20 seconds to install them. Windows monthly update on the same hardware would take fucking ages to install before it reboots, then ages again to complete installing post-reboot.

Yep, IT worker here and all of our client machines run Windows 11 with all the usual Office 365 stuff. Most of our servers run Windows too. A small amount of servers are Linux-based, usually VMware hosts and some virtual appliances. Broadcom is fucking us over a barrel on VMware licensing/support but the inertia is so strong that the powers that be won’t even entertain migrating to something like Proxmox. Something something Gartner top quadrant…

Work provides us relatively decent Dell Latitude hardware but we are stuck using the corporate Windows 11 image.

If they’d let us bring our own tech I’d be on a Thinkpad running Fedora and just use remote desktop to access all of the Microsoft shit.

I dabbled with Linux on and off several times over the last 20 years but never stuck with it for long, usually because of some giant pain in the ass getting some piece of hardware to work properly, plus I like to play games too and that used to be a huge stumbling block.

Microsoft’s escalatingly shitty behavior around Windows 11, combined with how much desktop Linux has matured with things like Proton/Heroic Launcher/Bottles solving most of the compatibility problems finally pushed me over the threshold for a full switch to Linux.

I’ve been running Linux-only (first Mint, then Fedora) on my laptop for about 2 years now without problems, and finally took the plunge on my desktop PC about a month ago. Massive props to Proton for making this feasible now. I have Windows 11 installed on a spare 256GB SSD that I had just in case there was some kind of show-stopper that I needed to go back to, but haven’t booted back into it since making the switch except for one time to check that it works.

Once the gaming problem was solved (I’m not worried about kernel level anti-cheat because I’m not into that type of game), the last thing tying me to Windows was Adobe Lightroom. I do miss Lightroom and I’m not as skilled using the FOSS alternatives to that product, but I just decided ‘fuck it’, Adobe are assholes with them making Lightroom subscription-only anyways.

It is so nice not being nagged to use one drive or sign in with a Microsoft account and have bullshit slop content shoveled at me by my operating system any more. Seriously, fuck outta here with that no-local-accounts horseshit.

Anyway, not going back any time soon.

I play a bunch of Steam games on it. I also have some Epic and GoG stuff through Heroic Launcher. I haven’t tried any pirated stuff.

I’ve become quite the fan of Fedora with KDE. Running Fedora 43 on both my couch Thinkpad and my gaming desktop. Only issue I’m having with it is sleep functionality on the desktop, which just sucks (it likes to not wake up from sleep) so I have that set to not go to sleep, just turn the screen off when idle.

I’ve just been avoiding nvidia the last couple of times I bought a GPU because they were so goddamn expensive, lol. It is just super convenient that this coincided with me starting to game on Linux.

My condolences

I finally committed to the switch last weekend. My desktop PC was the last holdout still on Windows in my fleet, because of Adobe Lightroom. I decided to just force myself to learn Darktable, and nuked the Win 11 install and replaced it with Fedora 43.

Fun side note, some of my games run way better than they did on Windows, despite not having native Linux builds. lol.

x64-compatible CPUs have been the norm for a very long time now, which is why most modern distros have dropped support for older 32-bit x86-only CPUs. Debian dropped it with Debian 13, so anything based on that - think Ubuntu, Mint, and others, would be in the same boat. 2GB of RAM would be pretty performance-limiting on most modern distros too.

That’s one of the reasons why things like Tiny Core and Puppy exist, though. Specifically for old/slow-by-today’s-standards systems. I haven’t used any of them because I’m not running anything that old, and I quite like modern KDE. I saw an Action Retro video on youtube the other day where he got Tiny Core running on a Pentium 133 with 128MB of RAM, lol.

Rumor has it their garbage AI thinks they are hacking techniques.

Because of the continual enshittification of Windows 11 with each major update.