Full-time free software advocate and part-time reader of エロゲ.
The GNU kernel was not originally supposed to be called the Hurd. Its original name was Alix—named after the woman who was my sweetheart at the time. She, a Unix system administrator, had pointed out how her name would fit a common naming pattern for Unix system versions; as a joke, she told her friends, “Someone should name a kernel after me.” I said nothing, but decided to surprise her with a kernel named Alix.
I think Krita is a more viable competitor to Photoshop than Gimp at this point… It’s also great for pen tablet drawing and arguably superior in that category.
Absolutely agree it’s there for artists. Krita is a very successful project and I hear mainstream artists talk about it often, while not being an artist myself. Well, technically I own a Cintiq…
I haven’t been able to get it to work well with PSDs, though, and I find the interface clunky for the sort of image editing I’m doing. I find GIMP easy enough to use, but it unfortunately lacks some crucial features. 3.0 is right around the corner (for real this time), so I’m hopeful. Unfortunately, PSD is a must because of collaboration. GIMP’s ingest of PSD is better. But Krita does have non-destructive effects.
What I’m really hoping for is Affinity Photo to work well in Wine. Most people can get it running now but I think it’s a little buggy or lacking in performance. I’ll have to give that a shot soon.
But yeah, video editors are lacking. Kden live is ok (and awesome for the price)
As it so happens, I’ve thought about this a lot.
Kdenlive is definitely the best free software option but the lack of hardware accelerated playback really kills it dead in the water for me. I’m hoping it will improve soon, given the success of the fundraiser. DaVinci Resolve is fantastic but needing to transcode footage if you have H.264/AAC source footage (geh, I know, but some of us do) and being stuck with H.264 hardware encode in the best-case scenario is not great. I found Lightworks was the best option in terms of professional features + workflow. Proprietary, but hey, at least it works really well on Linux.
Audio editors are behind too. Audacity is pretty good for 2 track. Bitwig is a great multitrack alternative to Ableton… But Ardour isn’t developed enough for a pro studio and I’ve never seen one that uses Linux. Part of this is poor support for vst plugins developed for Windows, mostly due to their copy protection.
That’s a shame to hear! I don’t work with audio on a very professional level, so Audacity is fine for my use cases. It’s improved in a significant way since the Muse Group acquisition (mainly non-destructive editing, but plenty of other stuff). I’m also annoyed but unsurprised to hear that DRM has thwarted compatibility yet again.
There are also Windows users who rely on niche business applications. Wine isn’t great for that sort of software yet. Another big one is the creative industry. While the VFX industry is very Linux-focused, and 3D is very viable, other parts of video production are not. And GIMP needs non-destructive editing before it can even think of competing with Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Inkscape is a viable vector image tool. The many other Adobe programs don’t have great alternatives, and if you need to collaborate, that means you all need to switch to a new program. Then there are the retraining costs to consider.
Gamers have the easiest time in switching to Linux. The amount of compromises and sacrifices you need to make in other industries are much greater right now.
However, Adobe is trying to bring some of their programs, like Photoshop, to the web. It’s unlikely we’ll see stuff like After Effects on the web, but Photoshop, Illustrator, maybe even inDesign could possibly, maybe be there in a few years. Photoshop web is already in beta (though it’s garbage). The web continues to be the great equalizer.
I don’t know if they’re still 720p locked on the free version.
Yes, it’s still locked to 720p on the free version, but the Create plan is very competitive at $9.99 a month. It has all of the features of Pro except encoding is limited to H.264/AAC and AV1 on Vimeo/YouTube, and you have no control over the encode aside from resolution. That was enough for me, though. I’m not doing anything super professional but I’m doing more than you can do easily with most of the NLEs on the list above.
I’ve tried LW before but I never really liked the workflow.
The workflow kind of broke my brain when I first looked at it a few years back but after acclimating to it I quite like it. The cutting is keyboard-based in a way most other NLEs aren’t, but yeah, it can definitely be annoying without some tweaks. Were you using Lightworks when they didn’t have a Fixed Layout option? The Flexible Layout pretty much leaves you to it, but the Fixed Layout is very reminiscent of Resolve. What I love most about Lightworks is definitely the speed. It’s the fastest and most responsive NLE I’ve ever used (Cinelerra probably comes a close second). And it gives you good Color tools and many other powerful features! Not a common combination. The community is also full of knowledgeable people, but that’s true of Resolve too.
Anyway, if you’re happy with Resolve, there’s no reason to consider switching. Pricing wise Resolve beats out Lightworks after two years of Pro license ownership and the licenses are less annoying. Main reason I went for Lightworks is I didn’t want to be forced to keep a NVIDIA GPU forever. It seems less disruptive to my workflow in the long run. How is Resolve stability-wise for you? I’m still trialing Lightworks but the ownership cost is leading me to re-consider Resolve…
Having a look at the Resolve 18 Codec manual, I see they’ve moved from CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 8.6. I’m glad they didn’t kill the GNU/Linux version or something along with CentOS, lol…
I like Kdenlive and used it for a few months, but I also really like Lightworks. Lightworks is proprietary, but it’s also a professional tool. Unlike DaVinci Resolve, it will decode and encode H.264/AAC, and most people don’t need much more than that, though AV1 is also supported. The color correction tools in Lightworks are better than Kdenlive’s and the cutting tools, while they take a while to get used to, are quite nice when paired with they keyboard. Best of all, Lightworks is a lot faster to startup, doesn’t crash as easily and it’s always responsive.
The most annoying part has to be dealing with licenses. If you use up your two licenses, you need to contact their support via email to shuffle them around. It’s a great program, but this is super annoying. It also discourages you from purchasing the perpetual license because you don’t want to get stuck in this situation. Mind you, their support is very friendly so I have no doubt they’d help you out, but it’s an issue of needing to ask them in the first place. DaVinci Resolve’s licensing system at least works perfectly fine, no matter what, or so I’ve heard. If you activate a new computer, it will just deactivate an old installation, and that’s it. No need to wrangle customer support while everyone’s on holiday…
The other professional option on GNU/Linux is DaVinci Resolve.
DaVinci Resolve is a very nice NLE at a very nice price, though proprietary. But $500 is a lot better than the $800,000 it used to cost. Annoying to install although fat-tire’s containerization project is worth a look for easy installation. However, it doesn’t work for my source footage, even with Studio. The free version doesn’t support H.264 decode/encode or AAC decode/encode, which are the two main codecs you’ll see with MP4, the most ubiquitous (and patent-encumbered) video format in the world. The Studio version supports H.264 decode/encode only with NVIDIA GPUs, but it still doesn’t support AAC decode/encode. It can encode H.264 though, which will leave you with an MP4 file with no audio track.
To use DaVinci Resolve with H.264/AAC in a livable way, you need a NVIDIA GPU, you need to purchase the Studio edition, and you need to transcode your audio from AAC to something Resolve can ingest. There are scripts to automate this. Optionally, you should also purchase a third-party AAC encoder plugin for Resolve so you don’t need to transcode again after rendering, assuming you’re targeting H.264/AAC on render. If you’re not, you can just render to Quicktime/PCM .mov.
As much as I love DaVinci Resolve, I kind of didn’t think that was worth it for me at the time so I went with Lightworks which supports H.264/AAC encode fine with their Free/Paid licenses. I think I’ll come back to DaVinci Resolve after 2028, when the patents for H.264 and AAC have finally expired (hopefully), and DaVinci Resolve includes decode support for AAC (hopefully). I might still use the Fusion tab for creating some VFX, but I’m trying to see if I can work with Natron first.
As for other NLEs:
Edit: Olive is nice too but very early stages. Color tools are very basic. And unfortunately development is winding down.
Ah…sorry, I just realized this probably isn’t the response you’re looking for. But I’ve spent a lot of this week trying to find a professional NLE on GNU/Linux and that was what I came up with. For the record, I’m a GNOME user and I liked Kdenlive the most out of free software NLEs. I’m looking forward to the new improvements to come from the fundraiser to improve workflow!
TIL Firefox could use the updated GNOME File Picker with thumbnails. Just set widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker to 1 instead of 2.
Ah, I can see how that might be useful. I first learned about the command pallette when I needed to instruct everyday users on taking a full-page screenshot on Chrome…it’s far more complicated than Firefox’s method of Right-Click > Take Screenshot. Just another odd thing, lol. Interestingly, Firefox is considering implementing this feature: https://github.com/firefox-devtools/ux/issues/101
I don’t think it would make much sense in my workflow right now but I can see how it would benefit others. Quickly turning on accessibility constraints I’m sure would be very useful. One thing Firefox’s dev tools is desperately missing is search. I get along fine without it, but it would be nice to have.
Photoshop Web (Beta) only supports Chromium-based browsers, Descript only supports Chromium-based browsers (well, Firefox still seems to work but you’re on your own), and many new webapps are only supporting Chromium-based browsers. Now, these are beta products, so that might change, but it seems unlikely. So I’ve been switching to Chromium-based browsers to use some of these apps, but I’d really rather not. It’s the way everything is going, unfortunately.
A lot of developers target the web because it means they can have one codebase that is supported on multiple operating systems. Imagine how much harder it would be to develop a macOS, ChromeOS and GNU/Linux version in concert with the Windows version. In reality, some browser engines support more web features than others, and Google has by far the most resources to keep up with those standards. So Firefox is an afterthought. Google Chrome is on every operating system worth supporting anyway, so why bother supporting another browser? It’s a lot less work and testing.
MDN is the best place to read about those standards, though.
I like Firefox:
Okay, it’s mostly the search engine thing, to be honest.
But Firefox still doesn’t use the new GNOME thumbnail view when you’re uploading files, for example…
I also prefer chromium dev tools, though it isn’t that bad to switch to Firefox’s dev tools.
I actually vastly prefer Firefox’s dev tools to Chromium’s. There are keyboard shortcuts to open every tab, it has a color picker, it has a multi-line Javascript console, and in general I find it more intuitive. Chromium developer tools seem to be less complete than Firefox and harder to use.
I just learned Chromium technically has a color picker tool, but you need to scroll through CSS propetries to find a color selector, click the color, then click the color picker. With Firefox, I tap CTRL+SHIFT+I to open dev tools, click the color picker which is front-and-center, and it copies the hex code to my clipboard. This is a microcosm of my overall experience with Chromium’s developer tools. Everything is slower or further out of reach.
I don’t know how it ended up this way.
I wish I’d known how to use node-based compositors like Natron to produce VFX so I don’t have to keep going back to macOS to use After Effects.
Oh my goodness, I’m sorry to hear that this is happening to others but I am so glad its not just me. This has been something that’s driving me crazy, because I knew it wasn’t a cable / GPU issue due to the fact that it doesn’t occur in Windows.
I know right! I thought it was something I did! You don’t know how many times I’ve gone into the back of my monitor and tried to shove the HDMI cable in just a bit further, to no effect. I thought I’d broken it by trying to run Sway or something…
Nope, the driver is just that bad. Ughhh.
KDE is worse, but GNOME isn’t great either. It’s been going on for months! Additionally, I have “Prefer Maximum Performance” set, but it hasn’t helped much. I’ve seriously been considering an AMD card next year… I have an RTX 2060S with 535.98.
Yeah, uhh…it’s pretty stupid. The more I think about it, the more shocked I am that BMW is so aware of this that they need two separate warnings for it in the handbook, but make it the owner’s responsibility not to put themselves in that situation…?
Car is on some sort of lease program where you trade it in for the next model after a few years. There would need to be some way of installing a manual release without causing damage to the car…or preventing BMW from taking it back.
TIL Teslas are better designed than this BMW model 🤷♀️
Is your issue that Lutris is buggy or limiting? I haven’t encountered buggy behavior in Lutris, and it gives you a ton of options. I like some parts of bottles but I would really like to be able to change cover art without editing a config file, lol. It’s definitely the easiest way to get started with Wine though.
There’s Heroic Games Launcher too, by the way. It has less features than Lutris but it’s probably easier to use? It’s also prettier than Lutris, I think. What issues were you having with Lutris?
I’ve only used CrossOver on Linux and actually find it harder to use than Lutris. There’s some crazy stuff like needing to declare environment variables inside a configuration file instead of having a GUI for it. But if you look at CodeWeavers’ blog and release notes, you’ll see them constantly making changes to improve gaming on macOS. That’s where they seem to be devoting most of their energy these days. CrossOver on Linux worked for Microsoft Office when I needed to use it, but that was the only reason I bought it.
I still think it was a worthwhile purchase, if only to support further Wine development. CodeWeavers has a great article about the differences between CrossOver and other Wine distributions: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/alasky/2019/3/21/wine-crossover-and-proton-whats-the-relation
PlayOnLinux is no longer under active development (even Phoenics seems to have been stale for a while now), and Steam’s Proton, Lutris, or Bottles are what you should use on Linux nowadays.
When developers need to draw graphics on the screen, they use an API like Direct3D (or DirectX) or Vulkan to accomplish it. Direct3D only works on Windows. Vulkan works on many operating systems. Vulkan replaced OpenGL.
DXVK translates DirectX calls, which only work on Windows, to Vulkan calls, which will work on Linux and other operating systems. It’s so good at this that it’s better than commercial game engines like Unity. DXVK is a separate project from Wine. Wine also uses wined3d to convert older Direct 3D calls to OpenGL calls, for the same effect.
Lastly, there’s VKD3D, which is Wine’s own Direct3D12 ➜ Vulkan compatibility layer. Valve forked this and created VKD3D-Proton, which is specifically designed for games, as opposed to general software.
Yes, it’s a bit confusing.
I was aware of the Game Porting Toolkit announcement. In fact, I first learned of it from CodeWeavers, who noticed Apple used their code to develop it.
We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit. We have decades of experience creating ports with Wine, and we are very pleased that Apple is recognizing that Wine is a fantastic solution for running Windows games on macOS. We did not work with Apple on this tool, but we would be delighted to work with any game developers who try out the Game Porting Toolkit and see the massive potential that Wine offers. Our PortJump™ team has perfected the art and science of creating ports of Windows applications using our Wine technology, and we welcome inquiries about how we can help get your game working on macOS.
I don’t play games on macOS, but my understanding was the same as yours; that it was a testing tool for developers to test out how the game might work on macOS. That’s how it was presented. I didn’t think it was meant to be used by macOS users.
In any case, CrossOver is intended to be used by macOS users (and the GPT uses the same code, as enthusiastically explained above), and it has a good graphical interface. I think these factors make it obvious to recommend CrossOver as the canonical solution for playing Windows games on macOS.
macOS has made it difficult for both game developers and Wine developers to support the platform by letting their OpenGL support rot, removing 32-bit support, ignoring Vulkan and coming out with their own graphics API, Metal. Wine is in a worse state than on GNU/Linux. There aren’t many native games available for macOS.
That being said, your best bet is likely CrossOver. They employ the principle Wine developers, worked with Valve on Proton, and have put a lot of effort into supporting macOS. They’ve got a free trial with complete functionality you can try out.
But if the games you’re playing have native releases for macOS, that’s not something you need to worry about. There are just so few games available on macOS that I assumed they don’t. Now, I only have an Intel iMac which I never play games on so I couldn’t tell you how the newer ARM laptops perform.
This blog post doesn’t mention GTK, but I’ve heard GTK will sometimes implement breaking changes in minor version bumps. I was thinking about writing some software with GTK, and I haven’t been deterred so I guess I’ll learn the hard way, but has GTK 4 had any of these stability problems yet?