Not sure about the best overall but one of my favorite karaoke memories is a metalhead friend of mine performing Weird Al - White & Nerdy.

Very interesting history and culture, plastered over with bland authoritarian turbo-capitalism that disguises itself as communism.

As a daily driver through most of university. Sadly the hardware got way too expensive for what it did, at least for a while. These days it might be better again but I won’t buy an MBP to replace a laptop that’s only a year old.

Cool. Can you help me solve mine so I don’t have them either?

Thanks for the long reply, lots of stuff to unpack here that I might have to come back to later. Might be helpful.

So for now, let me focus on your question about my photography workflow. I mostly do event photography (discos, concerts, conventions) but also occasionally studio and travel stuff.

When I come home from a shoot, I copy my photos to a network drive on my home server (running Ubuntu) which automatically gets backed up to an off-site NAS. As a first step, I use Bridge to label which photos I want to edit for myself, which for a potential client, which not at all. Nothing special, just running through all RAWs and marking them with star or color labels. For the editing step itself, I start out with Camera Raw. First an overall pass with lens correction, cropping/straightening, brightness adjustments (exposure, contrast, blacks/darks/lights/whites), white balance, dehaze, curves, whatever the photo needs. Then, depending on the subjact, a more in depth pass with spot removal and masked adjustments. Automatic subject masking has been a great time saver. If I need to go even more in depth (usually only for photos that go to an exhibition), I start editing in photoshop. As a last step, I use Photoshop Image processor to bulk export JPGs in the needed size and quality, optionally with a watermark.

(for those familiar with Adobe’s tools, you might be wondering why I don’t use Lightroom instead. In the past I’ve had problems with accessing the same library from different machines. This could probably be fixed but my current setup works fine so I never bothered)

For long term library management, I run immich on my home server which lets me tag and filter my photos as much as I want.

As for the Blender thing, I think I phrased that weirdly. It was not related to a specific problem or my photo editing process. It was just an example for a piece of software that started out with horrible developer-user UI and got a lot better when they completely redid the UI in 2.8.

Regarding Photoshop in Wine: unfortunately, missing GPU support is probably a no-go when dealing with 6000x4000 pixel, 14 bits per channel raw photos.

Also a tiny bit amusing that within 24 hours, it was rated it both “Garbage: It launches, that about it.” and “Silver: it pretty much works well with a few caveats.”

One of my first experiences with linux was gentoo back in ~2006 so patience is not an issue. Documentation that requires you to already know what you need to do is a problem though and the exact reason why I haven’t touched proper Arch so far.

The right choice doesn’t help me if I can’t get my literal job done and have to give up half of my hobbies.

Why?

I don’t ask that to talk you out of it. I like desktop Linux. I’m typing this on desktop Linux. I’ve been using desktop Linux for most of my adult life. I ask because your reasons will inform the advice people can give you.

Because enshittification is becoming more and more unbearable. So far, Windows 10 (and to some extent even Windows 11) works for me but it’s getting worse and worse every year. I have no interest in OneDrive, Copilot, Recall and whatever MS wants to sell me next. I’d rather have a system that does exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less. On servers and embedded systems, linux has done a great job for me over the last 20 (!) years.

Another option is to run Windows in a VM for those apps.

Kind of defeats the purpose if I run my two most-used applications in a Windows VM, doesn’t it?

I’m more than open for using something different and learning a different workflow as long as I can eventually get to the point where I can get roughly the same results in roughly the same time. I like tinkering with stuff and I’m not even opposed to write my own tools for closing a few gaps in the applications I use (see my recently started immichtools). But there is a limit. I just can’t afford to spend half my day working around problems that I wouldn’t have had on Windows.

Edit: formatting

What you’re proposing is exactly how I got to the point where I’m writing this post. My servers are mostly Ubuntu, apart from a couple of Pis that run Debian. So naturally, I’ve tried Ubuntu, Mint and Pop!_OS. I can’t remember exactly which desktop environments I’ve tried over the years but at least Gnome, KDE, XFCE and Cosmic. Probably more.

When that didn’t work out, I tried Fedora and even some Arch-based distro (I think it was EndeavourOS).

Each time I ran into the same frustrations. Stuff didn’t work and troubleshooting consisted more of filtering which guides are actually applicable to my current combination of software than actually solving the problem.

One on my self-hosted Lemmy, one on my self-hosted Mastodon and one on a different Lemmy instance for stuff where I want to be a bit more anonymous than with a nickname that I use on so many platforms.

Only rich studio bosses and investors are allowed to exploit Hollywood.

As said: it’s not just the current government. As soon as the data is on a government server, it’s every single government for the rest of my life. And that’s a gamble I wouldn’t be willing to take.

And there’s a big difference between a police agency spending lots and lots of time and money to get to the people they’re interested in (gestapo, stasi, whatever) and them already having the data and being able to filter by whatever criteria they want at zero extra cost within seconds.

When it comes to my data, I treat everyone like they’re my enemy. Some of those enemies I do have to trust with parts of my data, otherwise I couldn’t live a normal life but I still would want to avoid giving a single entity (especially one that literally has power over people) too much at once.

Also, I do live in a country with plenty of public services and a more or less functioning government. Still, 20.8% voted for literal Nazis in February and no matter how often I vote for someone more sensible and how many protests I join, that probably won’t make those people less hateful.

Explain to me how running the registry office gives them nearly as much info about people’s preferences as a dating app does. They may know who people are married to and if they have children. From that they might have a rough idea if someone is straight or not and that’s about it. They don’t know if some who’s in a heterosexual marriage is actually bisexual or even uses the marriage as a socially accepted front to hide being gay from their family. The state has no idea where an umarried person lies on the spectrum from aromantic-asexual to bouncing from orgy to orgy on a daily basis. They don’t know if someone is into BDSM, roleplay, doing it outdoors or threesomes. They also rarely know much about non-sexual hobbies.

All those things may show up in dating site profiles or if not there, in the private messages sent between users. And this is not even about a government not being trustworthy now. Anything that gets put in such a site will stay there for the foreseeable time and even the most stable democracy might be just one freak election away from having a weirdo in power who thinks that people who like sex with their socks on don’t deserve health insurance.

Of course that’s also a risk with private dating platforms but at least for those the government would have to subpoena this kind of data from them instead of having it always available without the public even knowing if and what they’re analyzing.

I would rather not have the state sit on a huge database of people’s sexual orientation and other preferences, thank you very much.

Remind me… is that the same UK that currently tries to force apple and google to include governement backdoors into their encryption?

Wait, what were the arguments for electrons not existing? And by whom? It’s generally accepted that electrons exists and neither of their fields would work if they didn’t. You’d have to go really deep down into “well actually, everything is a wave” terretory to even get that idea and even then it doesn’t make sense.

I wrote both my bachelor’s and master’s thesis to Watch The Skies from Skyrim on loop. Yes, the same track all day for weeks.

Important note: this is about quantum teleportation. They transferred data between two quantum computers without a cable or wifi. Teleporting matter, let alone matter in useful quantities is far off.