yeah i agree- I don’t do a lot with my linux- i mostly just surf the net, upload photos from my camera, do email, play some good solitaire games- and really that’s about it- people that want to do more would likely find it a bit more involved- perhaps difficult- but since my needs are really basic with linux- i don’t have to delve into the guts of it- and everything just works right out of the box- no mucking around required- I simply use it for all my Internet browsing- email etc- and then at night switch over to windows for windows only games (I like iracing online- which is the only game i play online in windows), and to do some photoshop work and manage my photos (I like windows programs for managing photos better than linux’s)- other than the one racing game- i don’t allow windows to be online- I just got sick of always having to ‘harden windows against viruses’- which is the main reason i switched to linux for all my online work
What’s important I think with this is all the normal everyday stuff that Linux can do for you much safer without all the windows bloat and conflicts.
I like the ability to go manage and download software right from the desktop and have the manager do the hard work of checking for all the other files needed for the program you are grabbing and put it all together for you at one time.
Way too many time MS programs have sent me doing a lot of searching and downloading third party files to make something work properly. It seems to always be a wall of obstruction because of “incompatible versions” and similar.
Have you played with STEAM yet? Man... A whole world of gaming there made for Linux.
I find myself on linux 95% of the time but do have dual boot. The one thing I like photoshop for is the ability to do batch processing. You can also actually have it record your steps and then have it do the same procedure on a folder full of images. Other than that, I’ve learned to work gimp pretty well and can do most anything with it. There’s a gimp plugin called Save for Web, named after the photoshop feature. That comes in handy.
Now to really blow one’s mind, is imagemagik. A command line based image editor. Completely weird editing an image without having the image open to look at but it works great for optimizing images for the web. It also runs on most web servers or at least the ubuntu based ones. You can throw 500 files at it and it won’t crash because it’s not taxing the processor(s) by rendering the GUI and images. I’ve had photoshop freeze when doing batch operations.
I go to windows for TurboCAD as I learned on it and it’s way easier to me than any other CAD, also for my scantool and auto repair software.
One can run linux without ever having to type a command. There might be an occasion you need to do it to fix something or do something out of the ordinary but that’s usually a matter of copy/paste the code from a website. No more scary than having to go into windows registry to make a change.
At one time, I had to create a bunch of PDFs with fields that could be filled in digitally, including a digital signature. That I had to do with Adobe software. Not much available to edit PDFs in linux.
Now that I found a good backup program called, Déjà Dup, I can swap linux versions in a couple hours and be up and running with the new version without losing anything, including program configurations. I open thunderbird and all my emails and accounts are there. I open firefox and all my tabs, history and cookies are there, yet I have a new OS to try out. I tend to change linux versions every year or two. At this point, I’ve tried about all of them but they come out with new features etc. I ran kubuntu for a while but the Plasma desktop was a bit unstable so I switched to Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop but I didn’t like the lack of settings so I ended up running Mint with kubuntu/Plasma and by that time, Plasma was straightened out. Mint is ditching it though so I’ll have to find something else at some point. Might go back to straight kubuntu with Plasma as I really like the full screen dashboard type menu.
My preferred version of windows is Win 7 Pro and since it never gets on the web and I have all security features and notifications turned off, it will never change.
I remember using windows exclusively. Worked great at first, then the updates start coming and it would get slower and slower all the time. Or you get a bad link and boom, “You’ve got Malware”.
I’ve had them all too. Started out printing invoices with DOS and a dot matrix printer. Then got a pc with win 3.1, then 95, 98, and so on.