Afternoon all.

I’m looking to make the switch away from Windows, and I wondered if people had any advice, distro suggestions and so on.

My main use cases for my PC are Gaming, Writing and Image editing. Things I’d love to have working are all my games, Epic, Steam, GoG and Game pass. I already use OpenOffice so I’m probably fine with that. And I currently use Photoshop, so a good alternative for that would be good. Finally Spotify, Discord and VPNs etc

Any and all help and suggestions would be welcomed, thanks in advance.

  • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.website
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    20 hours ago

    What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.

    However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.

    Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”

    As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.

    Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.