My question was specifically about “the general non-technical population”. Do you expect my mom to even remotely understand what different servers are and why talking to me is securely encrypted but talking to her friends group isn’t? The point about secure software is that it needs to be secure by default or else, entry level users will manage to accidentally send their stuff in plain text and not even notice.

For nerds like us, I agree that Matrix is probably a good choice. For someone who needed to be told that “the internet” isn’t the blue “e” on their desktop… not so much. I’d rather send carrier pigeons than explain Matrix to my family.

What would you recommend as an alternative for the general non-technical population?

I‘ll give my best to give you some feedback if you post something

Dooo iiiiiit! I really enjoy reading about niche homebrew settings.

I even made a new account specifically so I could make it there and not on my personal instance.

From what I can tell from the article, that’s exactly the point. This is not about manufacturer-sanctioned intentional fingerprinting but about every printer making slightly different mistakes by accident that just happen to be consistent enough to be recognizable.

There were a few things that it eventually got but lacked for way too long like support for UNIX line endings.

For video editing I would highly recommend DaVinci Resolve. So far I’ve only used it on Windows because I haven’t had any need for it since my switch but it’s available for Linux as well.

So what do I do when I need to get something done on a deadline? VM? Dualboot? Just give up?

Please don’t interpret that as an attack, it’s a serious question. I would love to fully move to linux. I’ve put Arch on my laptop about a month ago as an experiment and overall it works great. But every time I need to be productive, I hit a wall. Especially with photo editing but even for software development (mostly C# and C++), Windows 10 + WSL feels like the better choice.

Well, are you a developer?

I am. I have written software, both open source and commercial, for almost twenty years now and the most important lesson I have learned in that time is that developers alone don’t write good software. You need to listen to UI/UX experts, testers and user feedback to make something that people actually want to use.

Just for maybe an hour or so, haven’t had time for more. It seems a bit better but still too different from everything else to assume people can „just“ use it instead of the solution they are familiar with.

Gimp really needs the kind of in-depth UI/UX redesign that blender got with 2.8.

I tried again and again to do the things I need to do with gimp but it still lacks many features and the ones it does have are hard to use. Sometimes it’s not about ideology but about needing to get shit done.

I have used Vivaldi as my main browser pretty much since the initial release and it’s great.

I think that one baffles me the most. They make an argument for Shenmue and even if I don’t agree with it being on one, I can somewhat see why it’s on the list. But KCD2 has no right to be on the list at all. As they state themselves, the game is not even two months old. We can’t even remotely say what its long-term influence on the gaming industry will be. Though my money is on “none at all.”

HALF-LIFE 2

Okay that’s a little weird. We’re getting up into the real high-water heights here and I mean HL2 is good but…

This list is not about good, it’s about influential. HL2 was the first major game that based its core gameplay to its physics engine, the first to have HDR rendering and the game that Source engine was developed for. Without HL2, a lot of video games in the decade that followed it, would have looked a lot different.

SHENMUE

THE FUCK WHY WHAT

The article claims that Shenmue was the first to have a “living world” where characters follow their daily routines and so on. But yeah, I have my doubts if all the other games that do that were influenced by it.

Sorry to be the buzzkill here but this is not encryption but obfuscation and can easily be broken by comparing letter frequencies, so don’t use this for anything more sensitive than your shopping list. This is not suitable for writing your next serial killer letters or a mysterious book about medicine that will stump scientists for centuries.

Still a really neat as a non-encrypted writing system though. I could see this in some sci-fi or fantasy media.

Edit: oh sorry, I missed that you mentioned it in the post body, I only read the title and then jumped directly to the explanation from your community’s sidebar.

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.”