New kid on the block

Coffee break
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Hi there Mandrivians :slight_smile:

I came her on my search to replace Windows. Probably like many others and I guess the number will only go up in the near future. Or at least I hope…

I am a veteran Adobe user of 30+ years. I used to work on sgi in the past and loved it. So Linux has always been on my table, but mostly on the “one day when I have time” stack.

As a photographer, dealing with color accuracy and fine art printing, doing 3D and webdesign plus the occasional flyer or postcard (color accuracy again), I am looking into this early.

On the other hand, why I really want a Linux up and running is, to be able to run all those Git projects i.e. Depth Map Detection. Making them work on Windows is hell. But with the October date looming concerning Windows and the behavior of Adobe lately, I feel that it’s time to start looking ahead.

So I am looking into various Linux distros and I got here because of Brian Lundunk’s Youtube channel, where he put an emphasis on OM being non political. Another Damocles sword which is hanging above everything and anything at this point in (repeating) history

Now, I am happy that this seems to be a non political environment here, but the topic I am interested to get advice from experienced OM users, is not that.

Im a curious if anyone here is using OM for content creation/production? How hard is it to get Nvidia cards running (I am on a Asrock, AMD 9950X with an MSI Geforce 3080Ti)? Can I calibrate my Eizo monitor and get DisplayCal to work and maybe even use my xRite calibration sensor? How’s the Installation process on OM? Can “simply” download Gimp, Darktable, Audacity, Pinegrow, Blender etc. from the creators pages and install them on OM? Or am I bound to a store?

I am always trying to run LTS versions of apps, while I also like to dabble in betas and run Git projects.

And last but not least, there’s one software called 3DVista, which I can not replace so far. Unless I go down the Goive-Editor (or alike) route or build the functionality myself, based on ThreeJS or BabylonJS. 3DVista is a virtual tour software that spits out html compatible tours from panoramas, 3D models and lately also 3DGS! It’s an awesome software with terrible support, but it get’s the job done and is compatible with 99% of end user devices.

So, what’s the chance I could get that running in Wine/Proton/Bottles/Cubes on OM, maybe in a Windows VM, or some sort of emulator?

Thanks for chiming in, if you can dedicate the time!

Cheers,
Alex

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Welcome @alframe! Those are a lot of questions.

We are “not woke” and you can just be yourself around here. We have people of all types here and everyone just seems to get along and no one is running around looking for something that offends them.

Adobe is a no go. That is nobody’s fault but Adobe.

I and many others here are running nvidia cards. It’s just one single command, so I can’t see how it can get any simpler than that.

LTS? So you will want Rock 6.0 and that just released.

You may need to download and install a few things from the vendors, but most things are found in our repositories. The devs do take package requests though, so you won’t have to keep going to the vendors to update all your programs.

You would need to be running Windows in a VM to run anything Adobe and most likely the same for 3DVista. That’s not too hard to do. A lot of people run VMs. Just remember that a VM is only going to get part of your system, so it will never be as fast as running Windows on bare metal.

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Thanks @WilsonPhillips !! Yeah, sorry for text walling.

And thanks for your answer!

The thing about WMs is that if I search the interwebs about it, all that comes back is “don’t try”, or “it doesn’t work”. While I was running Things on WMs, ok, Windows on top of Windows, when we developed motion trackers for the desktop. But I also ran DeepDream on Windows in a Linux WM.

I ran Photoshop and Illustrator on an sgi in 1996. WTF is Adobe doing??? Besides Mac being “Unix”. Have they not seen “This is Unix, I know that” in Jurassic Park??? :wink:

I don’t care about speed in 3DVista that much. Well, to a certain point. I just don’t want to keep Windows around. At least after a while. Just like the multiple desktops we had on Indigo Magical Desktopia by sgi. I ended up working in one desktop and keep another around to render remotely on all the machines at the lab. But not the “Email desktop”, “Photoshop desktop”, “Power Animator” desktop as I set it up, when the feature was new (to me).

I am happy to encounter a community which dares to even say “We are not woke”. So far this has been a “no more coffee 'til infinity for you” sentence. While I am very politically informed, I don’t need to be taught “the right way” of asking a question, or being denied because of whatever doesn’t fit the narrative, when I want to get a bash script working…

I am looking forward to get the extra disc and start my transition.

There, I said it :stuck_out_tongue:

Cheers!

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Expect a learning curve, but you probably already know that and don’t have an issue with it. :grin:

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“Can’t teach an old dog new tricks - hold my beer!” But yeah. Anything rewarding takes time and patience and frustration is part of the journey.

Old school here. Literally…

Thanks for the encouragement!

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By the way, if you have the time (big thread), read

and realize that we have all sorts of people here and they all jumped right in and made this thread one of the funniest things you will read. No one was offended. A good time was had by all. I can’t think of another tech forum that could pull this off.

There’s no place like this place.

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Hey welcome @alframe! I’m not sure what your computer situation is, but if you can use a second machine, or somehow get both OS’s running side by side, then you can go little by little and not have a huge pain of making that switch all at once.

Mac was my world, and I sent both of my Macbooks to Louis Rossman for repair, and trial by fire, jumped into Mandriva. OM was awesome, but switching cold turkey like that was really painful.

Imo, if you have a second machine, can install on a partition, whatever, that will by far be the most pain free way to use it. I’m motivated to switch, but I’ve been in the Mac world since 2007 (DOS and Win before that). You get alot of things set up just how you are used to them in that amount of time.

So I don’t do your exact line of work, but I have found over time the majority of my applications are available in one form or another for OM. Those few that aren’t, I have either found replacements, or just jump over to my MBP for those for now.

Hope that helps with a little insight! The switch is totally worth it. It’ll pay off with dividends.

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Thanks @Thomas-Cee !

My plan is to familiarize myself with alternatives to Photoshop and Lightroom replacements (Gimp and Darktable) on Windows the next few months. Install Linux on a new disc and boot from either OS via BIOS (I do not trust boot loaders…).

My 3D and compositing work will be cold turkey on Linux, but that’s all happening in Blender anyways.

My hope is that I will be able to replace my P(T)S(D), aka. muscle memory, with Gimp. Darktable seems to be a good RAW developer, so I might switch anyways.

The two problems I see, which will have me keeping Windows around, is my existing catalog in LR Classic and that one App called 3DVista. I will attempt to move over finals of my photography work, but I will loose the edits I did in PS and LR.

I could live with Adobe tbh. Not with Windows tho’. I am using their software for over 30 years and I’ve seen them adapt to hypeisms in the past. It’s like this joke: A planet called earth meets another planet, also called earth. “Hey, how are you?” asks the first earth. The second earth answers “Oh not so good my friend. I have Homo Spaniens…”. “Ahh, don’t worry too much”, responds the first earth, “it will go over one day.”

It has to be said that Adobe really created a great universe for creators, but they’ve become like Google, a shithole of a company, not to say evil. But in contrast to Autodesk, Adobe did keep a lot of software alive after acquiring them and made them work together, all color managed and also maintain them for professional use. It’s tough to leave them behind and they know it…

But since my next phase in live will be taking on the most dangerous job, retirement (no one survived this one so far), I think I can jump ship and maybe even keep Dementia at bay by doing so.

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Just what I keep recommending.

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Just keep active and keep the sugar low lol! You’ll be in fantastic shape. I’m sure @WilsonPhillips has played a little more than I have, but I hear an app called wine will open Windows programs in Linux very smoothly now. I haven’t played with it since I’m using all native apps, but I do want to play with it at some point.

Potentially, you could keep using a single app or two (LR Classic and 3DVista) within Linux but that’s me hearing about it and not playing with it personally

Gimp also seems to have gotten so so much better. I used it years ago and PS was just much better it seemed. But Gimp is a solid contender imo now though. I don’t do it professionally so take with a grain of salt, but once you get muscle memory of where the new tool locations are I bet you’ll be in great shape.

Let us know how it goes!

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I try to disconnect the working OS drive when I install a new one on another drive, that way they don’t see each other. Then use grub-customizer to tell grub not to look for other OSes. Once that is done, I connect the old drive.

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You can try it like pewdiepie in his linux video. He used a shortcut config and also a theme that are close to photoshop. Or you could try photopea which is my favorite on Linux. And hopefully Affinity will someday launch a Linux version of their suite.

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I will look into this. Thanks a lot!

And yeah, Affinity would be great to have on Linux. I think that the behavior Adobe and especially Microsoft are conducting, will only hurt them in the near future and give alternatives a boost.

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This does appear to be the decade of corporate seppuku.

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Absolutely. And over here in Europe, the entire EU is about to jump off the deep end. Like Lemmings…

There’s a song I love dearly and it goes something like this: Learn to swim!

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I 100% agree with WillsonPhillips on separate disk for Linux and Windows. Even still you have to be prepared for breakage because Windows update can be very, very dangerous to boot loaders. I had two separate boot disks managed by rEFInd on my gaming rig, one w/Linux & Win10 LTSC, and another w/a Win11 install I was debloating to try it out. A Win11 update overwrote the Win10 boot loader causing none of the systems to boot. So always have a repair thumb drive prepped to go.

Looks like there’s some OSS for display calibration which may support your xRite depending on the model: DisplayCal supported devices Gonna give this a go myself with my Munki calibration device.

As Thomas-Cee said, you might be able to run the 3dVista software under WINE, but it looks like no one has tried any of 3dVista’s software in recent memory based on the listing at Wine HQ AppDB.

You might want to do some digging into Blender forums and automation tools to see if anyone has built a 3d tour pipeline which spits out HTML like 3dVista does. I would think that a fairly common use case for folks working on commercial assets to send to customers for early review. Worth a shot and the Blender community is pretty friendly in my experience.

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Thank you @rrthing !!

I plan to keep the OSs completely separate and switch the boot disc in the BIOS manually.

About DisplayCal, are you running the Python 3 community version, or the vanilla running on Python 2?

I wish there was a date with associated those Wine tests. But since the 3DVista versions they list are so old, that I don’t recognize them. 3DVista picked up the 2024, 2025 etc. versioning, like many others. So I’ll give it a go.

Somehow I am a bit amazed about the whole Windows apps deal on Linux. Back in the day, about 20 years ago, a collogue ran Softimage in a Windows VM on Mac with almost zero speed decrease. Now either Mac has integrated virtual machining very well, or Softimage was well coded. That was ICE not the regular Softimage. Because that code was creating ptsd in a heartbeat to a user, let alone someone who wanted to code for Softimage. e.g. it saved every little part of a scene into gazillion folders. Every cv, curve, every surface, every material, everything. A Softimage project folder was less obvious than the surface of Mars.

Hmmm, you are giving me ideas. Maybe I can come up with an addon for Blender doing virtual tours, now that coding can be done by AI. I know what I want and I am pretty good at prompting an AI :innocent:

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I’m away from home at the moment, but will give it a whirl when I am back. I’d try the Python 3 version first.

My use of Blender is limited to being one of those crazy people using it for CAD for 3d printing. I feel about AutoDesk like artists and photographers (of which I am one) feel about Adobe.

Good luck!