this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
589 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
59421 readers
3944 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People who use Linux don't seem to realize how painful bandaid that is to tear for Windows users. And don't get me wrong, I know Linux supports all of that and more, and in the long run it's better for everyone. But breaking people's habits is a tough achievement to make. People will get use to some pointless tool which is not available for Linux and that's it. Deal broken. Not to mention having multiple tools that your job depends on. Sure you can learn a new thing or two, but that can be also overwhelming for many.
Mines not even pointless. Lightroom and Photoshop are essentials for my side business, and there isn’t viable alternatives to either.
Linux works for a lot of things, but not everything.
I have linux on everything except a surface pro 5, which ONLY exists for adobe and autodesk apps. Probably only works because I’m using the versions I’m comfortable with (from 2012) and they’re not too terribly bloated.
It’s not ideal, but fuck if I’m gonna try learning freecad AGAIN.
jUsT uSe LiNuX 111!!!11!1!1!!1!!!!1!11!!1!1!21111111
i am primarily linux and i cannot completely tear away from windows/mac. there are some use cases where linux just isn't a good tool.
I'd argue that linux is fine for every use case, BUT there are obviously some tools that do not work on Linux simply because the devs don't support it. So it's more a matter of having to learn other tools, which can be a huge undertaking I'll give you that. The biggest step you can take towards using Linux is actually using all the open source tools on windows first. If all of your software works on both windows and linux, then changing the underlying operating system isn't that big of a deal anymore. (some exceptions do apply, like some games will never work on linux because of kernel level anti cheat or the devs seem to straight up hate linux users, see Destiny 2 for instance)
yes
no. in these cases the tools are just shit. i cannot use them to do my work.
No, it’s a matter of users moving to Linux so devs are forced to offer their products on it
That's okay. Half and half is fine. For a while I really wanted Linux phone, like pure Linux, but that prospect is not happening any time soon and why settle for inferior experience that much when you can get close to open source.
yeah it's fine because I can do whatever I want
I bet you'll sleep easier tonight knowing that your computing decisions are deemed to be acceptable by some rando on the Internet according to their standards.
Irfanview for me!
I'd debate calling it useless, but until irfanview works correctly on Linux (no, it doesn't under WINE) I can't change.
Just looked at the feature set as it's been ages and yep, infranview does stuff that gwenview doesn't. For filters more complex than rotate, add basic text etc. I'd open krita, for batching there's imagemagick.
This actually goes into philosophy: UNIX follows the "do one thing, and do one thing well" approach. Imagemagick is a better batcher than infranview, krita is a better editor than infranview, gwenview... well, is a better program to throw at random desktop users just wanting to view an image folder and rotate their snapshots precisely because it is not so overladen with features. Infranview is like if you took winamp and added half of a DAW to it.
It really should run under wine, though, things don't tend to get platinum-rated by accident.
I'd just like to correct you on UNIX following the "do one thing, and do it good" philosophy. UNIX preaches that, but is doing everything else than following it. From cat to grep to cp and dd and many many many other redundant tools that exist in the system. All that said, I would like to point out it's a completely pointless philosophy which serves no purpose it once had.
In the age of text terminals and when your work was managing phone books and writing documents, that made sense. Today we have far too complex systems to just expect people to work by making a pipe with 5 tools lined up to achieve something a single click in menu can do.
...redundant with what? Sure, instead of
grepyou can usesed -e g/re/p: First came ed which can do the same but requires the whole file to be loaded into memory so grep was written as a way to search through files ergonomically and quickly. Quite a bit later came sed to do more complex operations on files in a streaming manner: Sed is for streaming editing, ed is for interactive editing, they happen to share a common vocabulary but really are made for different things. grep knows exactly one word from that vocabulary and applies it to multiple files in a single command, something that's not really suitable for the editors.Can't think of anything that's redundant with cp, unless we leave the terminal. dd and cat might have some overlap but only if you combine cat with shell redirection. I'll freely admit that dd is a hell of a wart, though, it is so damn ancient it predates unix command line option conventions.
No. The way it usually works is that an end-user makes a click and things get handled by five different tools, completely behind the scenes. Power-users then can come along and customise that stuff as they wish.
That's the whole point, you are not suppose to use
grepifsedworks. You are not suppose to usecpifcat file > new.fileworks. That's the "UNIX way", which is stupid ascpbrings a lot more features when it comes to files. Back when that "rule" was inventedcatonly printed files on screen or piped them through. Nothing more. Today you can do all kinds of things with it and to be honest am happy that there are multiple tools doing the same thing. Grep is fine for some things RipGrep and SilverSearcher for others. Am not going to handicap myself or wait for 16h forgrepto finish digging inefficiently through files because someone said I had to do things "UNIX way".It's time we get rid of old ways and embrace modern computing, up to a point where people started building note taking applications in whole web browsers.
No. You
grepif you are searching for something. Yousedwhen you're editing a file in an automated manner. You usecpif you copy a file.cat foo > baris not, in the very slightest, idiomatic, and never was:cat foo bar > bazis and that's precisely whycatis named like that, quoth the man page: "cat - concatenate files and print on the standard output".cpcan't do that. If you usecatwith a single argument then without redirection, as the equivalent of DOS'stype.Don't think of "one thing, and one thing well" as "there must be no overlapping features", but "every program has a clearly-defined use case". If it can be used for something else, like single-argument cat, then that's fine, but that doesn't make cat the program to use when copying files.
And it means "there must be no overlapping features when combining random programs in arbitrary ways" even less: Your
cat foo > baruses two programs,catandsh. If the combination between multiple programs was restricted to not have features available elsewhere then you wouldn't get any of the benefits of being able to combine programs, this explosion of possibilities and with that approaches is precisely the advantage of combination.Never heard of silversearcher, but ripgrep is a straight-up grep replacement. Grep is 50 years old, ripgrep takes 50 years of experience people had with using the original to design a program that fulfils grep's purpose even better. There's no council of greybeards saying "there already is a program like that you shall use, we can't have two programs doing the same thing", that's not Unix but python.
I tend to agree. I use nushell, haven't really gotten into ripgrep I probably just don't grep often enough to care. My editor is helix which breaks in may ways with the line that started with ed but keeps the core philosophy intact, nay, adheres better to it because it was bold enough to get rid of hysterical raisins. As ripgrep it's an iteration of the same core idea and principles of an old program, in the light of 50 years of experience people had using it.
You could also combine a text editor and maybe pandoc. Different notes? Different files, that's what the file system is for. Need to find something in your notes? grep.
You'll be hard-pressed to find an actual use-case for a simple note-taking app under unix because the combination of things everyone half-way acquainted with the system already does it. There's org mode, yes, but org mode isn't simple. Also emacs is a completely different operating system.
Well, "duplicate" functionality isn't counter, but generally it's not quite "duplicate" either.
cat doesn't do much, and technically in most cases where people use cat, they can skip the use of cat. cat and grep aren't at all redundant, but maybe you mean cat |grep , versus "grep file", but really the first form is not a design intent, it's that cat is a habit to "get content to screen" and "pipe to grep" is a habit to filter out whatever content was on screen.
cp and dd are not really the same. dd is meant to take specific blocks from one place and put them in a specific place in one other file. cp is about copying whole files only, and can do a bunch of files to one directory.
As to it being 'obsolete', well the thing is that UI design has been swinging back to "CLI-y" ways, because you only have so much real estate on screen for guided menu driven action, and a fairly open ended universe of things people want to do. When people use office, they usually just start typing what they want rather than trying to find it by navigating the ribbon.
Though the "one tool and do it well" usually doesn't happen in GUI land (closest I can think is NextStep had some of it, and vestigial bits of that are possible in macos, though never used), but it's still plenty valuable.
The UNIX philosophy isn't about having only one way to do things - it's about being able to use tools together. The deliberately simple interface is what makes it so powerful - almost any existing too can become part of a pipeline. It's adaptable.
Didn't really call any tool useless, but pointless. As in there are other tools that do things similarly but not the same. But habits are habits and people are not willing to change always, especially if there are a lot of changes to be made, no matter how trivial. Comfort zone is called that for a reason.
Also, not everyone knows how to make something for themself. When I switched full time to Linux we had few options in twin panel file managers which I was use to (Total Commander). None of them worked the way I liked them to. That is to say respected system theme and didn't take a lot of time to refresh directory. So I wrote my own. But it's an ongoing endeavor and I have to say an exhausting one.
Apologies, word changed between brain and fingers.
No problem. I could have chosen better as well.
Same can be said for someone using Linux for years and switching to Windows. Not all tools are there, habits needs to change.
I think people commening under posts like that mostly know that switching operating system is not the same as changing desktop wallpaper. They are not saying it's easy, just that it's easier for most than they think.
I wish I had paint dot net, but it was a small price to pay for all of my games working
You can use GIMP though the UI takes a bit to get use to
I use Krita, Gimp, Pinta, and Inkscape depending on the use case
And would be considered a long term user now but thank you for offering a solution
I just wish Linux had a way of EQing my headphones and virtualizing surround sound like with HeSuVi. That's the barrier for me personally
EasyEffects exists, there is something called Catia or Carla which it can be use to run VSTs IIRC. But I am not an audio pro on linux or something like that.