What do you actually use as a VM backend? VirtualBox limits the VRam you can allocate, and other options (vmware) I’m not even sure work with linux.
In the old days laptops were rare and accessible only to selected few. The others in the background were just admiring the flawless handwork the arch user is displaying with the command line.
from someone's ... posterior? ... latter end? ... tuchus? arse is a bit more descriptive, eh?
How much do you think I earn to afford paying for Office or Adobe? :) i’ve never paid for any of those, even though I’ve been using Adobe since CS5.
As for donating: i agree, for now i sometimes help in contributing to the codebase in a bit smaller apps i actually can fix things in.
I used WPS, it was worse than Libre from the usability, plus quite bloated with all sorts of stuff (luckily, I don’t have to pay for the Office, and will never actually do that willingly). Haven’t used the other two, however, will have a look, thanks!
Both GIMP and Krita are very nice and decent, just not powerful enough for many things I need photoshop for. Inkscape is actually much closer to Illustrator (not as powerful, but still), so that might be the only one with the “getting used to it” issue.
Actually, one other thing I should have mentioned, is that I also transited from using Premiere Pro to Kdenlive (and sometimes even Blender for very light video editing). Kdenlive is an amazing success story for KDE, hope that happens to Krita as well.
PS. The name GIMP sounds amazing! Love it, they should never change it )
This has been some time ago. Because of the apps I mentioned I had to transit after a week of usage. But in that week, it was kinda nice. I don’t think from the upkeep standpoint it’s too different from other distros. Like I said, the main hard-to-overcome issues come from hardware support, often due to vendors unwilling to release drivers for Linux. But most of the major vendors (intel, amd, nvidia, etc.) have decent linux support nowadays, even not considering the myriad of open-source drivers.
I was also genuinely surprised with how well DEs nowadays support touchpads, and how customizable the gestures can be. That being said, ofc like I said, some of the apps do not release Wayland support (mainly the electron-based ones).
In short, lots of things are a bit more complicated than on Mac or Windows, but a lot of other things are much more straightforward and customizable.
A free-falling observer lives in a locally Minkowskian space-time, so feels no such thing. So I like my metric flat.
yes, i think we can all agree at least on the last point: that developing forward as a community, any Linux is better than corporate OSs. not because they're evil products of capitalist agenda (even though that's the case), but because developing them allows you to have a choice, and also incentivizes large companies to meet these security and freedom standards.
yeah, i mean apart from people satisfying their masochistic desires and highlighting their moral superiority by using CLI (look mama, ima hacker), Arch is genuinely a great OS. and, honestly, like i argued in my post, not as "masochistic" to install as people paint it to be.
i experimentally found that peeing standing (handstanding to be precise) is the ultimate way, so i learned how to do that (like i said, was last year)
in my case it was kinda easy, since they were actually linked in the Arch wiki directly!!! but, yes, i guess in general it might be an issue. maybe look for keywords such as "easyeffects profile <YOUR SPEAKERS>" or something along these lines. you can also play around a little with the app to find the settings that work for you.
agree, yes, especially the ProtonDrive configured through rsync: i really need it to be reliable, since i often travel and absolutely need my documents synced automatically with my PC. even in the early versions of ProtonDrive windows/mac app, it was often not syncing, and i would find myself on the road need to download a few gigs worth of slides and pdfs.
totally understand it. it took me about a full day to setup everything the way i liked (i'm also quite picky when it comes to usability), but honestly the next time i do it, i can probably do it in a couple of hours, since i now know all the ins and outs.
tried it... :( not really a replacement for me
honestly, i like the idea of Arch being completely bare bone. you can then keep track of everything you install afterwards, and that helps a lot when later you try to troubleshoot any issues, since you know exactly what's installed, what's modified, and what's running in the background.
like i mentioned above in the comment, i really meant to say OnlyOffice (but i also tried Libre, and a bunch of others)
I very much hope so too!!! i made myself to drift away from the Fusion 360 (they just took it a step further by moving a lot of stuff to the cloud) towards the FreeCad, and am enjoying its capabilities ever since. hope the same happens to GIMP. and it's not about getting used to it after Photoshop, it just really lacks some of the basic functionality i absolutely need.
unfortunately, it's a product of imagination of an overpowered progenitor of our future overlords, otherwise known as GPT-4. and apparently, it still does not want to produce 16x10 images (that is, unless you give it a sacrifice in the form of monthly subscriptions). but feel free to use the image for whatever purposes )
sorry, i really meant OnlyOffice. though i tried LibreOffice as well, you can see my breakdown in this post
I used linux intermittently in the last 15 or so years, migrating from early Ubuntu versions, to Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Debian, etc. And decided to give Arch a try just recently; with all the memes around its high entry point, I was really expecting to struggle for a long time to set it up just as I want.
Disclaimer: your mileage may vary. I’ve been using some sort of unix CLI since the time I learned to pee standing (last year?), and in case of Arch this prerequisite makes the whole process a lot simpler.
Learning curve
The installation process itself was quite simple. Perhaps the most complicated part was the disk partitioning and setting up the bootloader, as I’ve never done it myself. But then again — on any other OS you kind of have to do the same, except maybe through the GUI and not CLI.
One thing you quickly learn when using Arch — is you always should consult their wiki. Actually, “consult” is an understatement; let me put it this way, on the hierarchy of usefulness: there’s reddit, then stackexchange, then random “how-to” websites, then your logic, and then there is the Arch wiki. Exactly in that order, since your logic may betray you, but not the Wiki. Jokes aside though, they’ve somehow managed to document every minute detail, with specific troubleshooting for almost any combination of hardware out there. This is incredible, and as a person who also spends a lot of time writing documentations — hats off to the devs and the community.
Once you learn how the daemons work, how pacman and AUR packages work — the rest is actually quite similar to any other OS. Except that Arch, even with a bloated DE is frigging fast and eats very little battery. I actually use CLI package installation also in Windows (winget) or MacOS (brew), so learning to use another package manager was not too steep.
Drivers
The main caveats actually come when you want specific drivers for your specific hardware. For instance, the out-of-the-box drivers for my laptop speakers were horrible, with the sound seemingly coming from someone’s redacted (never checked, perhaps it was). But that could quickly be tweaked with the “pipewire/easyeffects” with custom profiles which you may find on the web.
GPU drivers were not really that much of an issue for me (if I actually read the wiki properly). Enabling GPU acceleration in some of the apps (like Blender) required the AMD HIP toolkit installed (they have Arch support) with some minor tweaks in the Blender configs. Similarly, the camera, mic and bluetooth drivers were available as AURs or even native pacman packages.
Caveats
Caveats that come with Arch are actually shared among almost all linux distros (or more specifically — DEs). Support of Wayland, while improving gradually over the years (with a great leap forward in Plasma 6), still sucks majestically. Luckily, for many of the most popular apps (slack, zoom), there are third-party AUR packages supporting Wayland natively (I spent a lot of time looking for exactly that on Debian with no success)! All of the apps I needed I actually found with the Wayland support in AURs, but, again, your mileage may vary.
Takeaways
I’d say if you just bought a fresh out-of-store laptop with no data on it to worry about — you should definitely give Arch a try, even if you’re a beginner. Once you fail a couple of times (like I did), you’ll not only learn a lot more about the behind-the-scenes working of your own computer, but will end up having one of the fastest and efficient OS-es out there, which you will now be able to configure to your exact liking.
Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to really daily-drive Linux (and this Arch experiment is no exception). Don’t get me wrong: I love linux and the idea of having independent open-source and infinitely customizable OS. But unfortunately I professionally rely on some of the apps, that have no viable alternatives for Linux (PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, Proton Drive).
PS. “but what about GIMP, or Krita, or Inkscape, or OpenOffice, or using rsync for cloud storage, or <YOUR_FAVORITE_TOOL>?” you may ask. Trust me, I tried it all. Every last presentation, raster/vector graphics software out there. Regardless of how much I hate Adobe, their software is top tier, and until GIMP becomes the Blender of graphic design, I can’t really rely use it for most of my purposes :(
In the post-COVID world where so much is done remotely I'm utterly amazed with the absence of a decent app for making slides. I recently went through a long and honestly very disappointing journey for finding the one and only app that fits my needs. And... yeah... there is none. Here are the requirements I have, and I can elaborate more on why exactly I need each of these. So, my perfect presentation making must:
- have interactive UI, where you can drag elements around with your mouse/trackpad;
- support dragging and dropping images AND videos and repositioning them;
- support latex (or at least something similar);
- work on all major OS-s: windows/macos/linux.
That's it. That's all I need. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm even willing to pay money to have the app (not as a subscription though)!
I admit that my needs might not be the most common ones, but I also don't think they're totally unreasonable.
Here are the apps/frameworks I tried, and where they succeeded and failed (all graded on the scale of 5), starting from the most popular ones.
--- (a) Microsoft PowerPoint (4.0/5):
+ (4/5) has nice interactive UI and allows for good configurability;
+ (5/5) supports all the major video encodings as well as images and GIFs;
? (4/5) does not support latex, but kinda has its own equation engine which is good-enough;
− (3/5) has no linux counterpart;
− comes bundled with the Office Suite, the majority of apps from which I've never used.
--- (b) Keynote (3.9/5):
+ (4.5/5) has by far the best UI and the collection of tools (perhaps the only thing it lacks is the ability to crop videos);
+ (5/5) same as PowerPoint, supports most of the formats that I typically use;
+ (5/5) has full support for latex equations;
− (1/5) no windows and no linux implementation;
− Mac-only, and the cloud version doesn't support most of the functionality -- so really, fuck you Apple.
--- (c) Google Slides (2.5/5):
+ (3/5) has a decent UI, but oftentimes feels very clumsy with the overly padded bounding boxes;
? (2/5) supports images and gifs, but fails miserably with videos, which it's only able to embed over youtube (or google drive);
− (0/5) no latex support, although I'm aware that some paid plugins allow for it;
+ (4/5) it's web-based, so works essentially on any platform;
− obviously, because it's web-based, you can't do anything offline.
--- (d) LaTeX Beamer (3.3/5):
− (0/5) no UI at all, and getting things line just right is quite a headache;
? (3/5) getting videos is kind of a nightmare really, as it compiles into a pdf, and not all pdf engines support videos;
+ (5/5) no comment;
+ (5/5) no comment, although you have to install an 8 GB-worth latex suite on your system, or do it on a website like overleaf.
--- (e) LibreOffice Impress (3.3/5):
+ (3/5) the UI is very reminescent of the Google Slides, so is kinda clumsy, although you can get used to it I guess;
+ (4/5) kinda of supports all the major image/video formats, but I've had trouble with some of the encodings;
− (1/5) no latex (although third-party plugins can enable it, but they never really worked well for me);
+ (5/5) supported no all major OS-s.
--- (f) Marp/Slippr/Cafe-Pitch/Reveal.js (3.5/5):
− (0/5) no UI;
+ (5/5) because they all use js-based engine (like electron), you can make any format work with them;
+ (4/5) same here, although some don't have latex out of the box, it's relatively straightforward to enable a MathJax or Katex support;
+ (5/5) takes some npm magin, but you can run it on frigging toaster.
--- (g) Slides.com (3.5/5):
+ (4/5) it basically uses the proprietary version of the reveal.js as a backend, and adds UI (a bit clumsy to my taste, but works ok);
− (2/5) same as above, but adding videos is paywalled;
+ (5/5) there is a full latex support out of the box;
+ (3/5) web-based, but you'll need an account, and lots of perks are paywalled.
--- (h) Figma (3.3/5):
+ (5/5) surprisingly good UI (it was made for vector design, so not surprising);
− (2/5) videos paywalled;
+ (3/5) some plugins add latex support, but still quite clumsy;
+ (3/5) has an app and offers a cloud-based web app, but you need to have an account etc.
--- I also tried other things, like Wolfram Mathematica (yes it can do presentations, although equations look kinda weird), Adobe Illustrator/Inkscape (i mean, why not at this point?), Prezi.com (more fancy, less functional). There are tons of web-based solution (e.g., visme), most of which have a subscription program, which I am not willing to try (I'm ready to pay once, but subscription programs go against my mental stability).
It seems that any solution I try falls short of what I would consider a pretty reasonable list of requirements. At this point I'm mostly using MS PowerPoint, but its lack of linux support really drives me mad. I'm interested to hear your thoughts and your experiences with presentation-making software? What are some of things I should try?
Recently I had to return the laptop from my workplace, and was briefly left without a working laptop. Luckily (that’s what I thought at the time), we had a spare old 2013 macbook laying at home with an upgraded battery and a 256 GB SSD. The only problem was – it had MacOS installed. Now, I don’t really have a problem with using MacOS, in fact I had to daily-drive it for the past 8+ years, as most of the time I was using a work-issued laptop, which unsurprisingly ran MacOS. But this time I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to try and install a working Linux distro on this old macbook? I mean, it’s not like I have anything better to do on a weekend, right? What followed was a journey of pain, suffering, surfing 8 years old forum posts, with occasional glimpses of hope and joy, which made the entire experience worth it. Some of the problems I encountered were really Mac-hardware specific, while the others had to do with the rather early stage of Wayland protocol and the HiDPI support in general in Linux (worsened by the disinterest of corporate software developers in spending at least some time on making sure their product works on not-so-widely-used OS-s).