For a meme community, is it really worth drawing the line at BSD? It’s in the same spirit. Tomato potato.

Yeah this is a reasonable take. GIMP has its core set of users, and, even though I could be wrong about this, I suspect that they like the UI as it is. They’re not beholden to making the most generalized image editing software for Linux.

This was my thought as well. Unix was built from the ground up as an OS to support researchers and engineers. Later people adapted it to desktop use. Windows was built to be easy to use for the average person from much earlier on. I don’t think anyone claiming that it’s not easier to use than Linux has used it lately or is being completely honest.

Fortunately, today the gap is really small compared to what it was IMO. Compatibility with games has gotten really good which pretty much leaves behind the proprietary professional apps in terms of raw functionality. With Microsoft testing the limits of how much they can exploit their user base, I think we’ll see slow but steady growth in the desktop Linux space.

No one does, but people like it when you install an application and it just works. It makes it easier to install applications regardless of which distro you’re on as well.

I think I could get by with Bitwarden/uBlock as a minimum. Addons like enhancer for youtube are super nice though.

mythical “average casual user”

Mythical? You realize people like this exist, right? This is why programs like this exist. Take Audacity for example, it was made with non-professional audio people in mind. Just people who have odds and ends to do with audio. It’s simple enough that someone with no prior knowledge can start poking around and figuring things out, and it’s advanced enough that it can get the job done for most people who need to work with audio files.

I’m not saying that GIMP needs to prioritize the first time user experience. If making the UI/UX more approachable for new users would necessarily make it worse for established users, then it may be a decent tradeoff. Denying the existence of people who just need to edit an image here and there is absurd though.

Hopefully someone more technical can pitch it, but it did feel very easy to set up and use. The utilities that it comes with just feel very well designed and thought out. If Debian was gone tomorrow, I’d probably try openSUSE again.

That’s a good point. I think Canonical offers some services where they will actively support your system, so it makes economic sense for them to make choices that limit transparency a bit for stability and predictability.

I think the dislike comes from the fact that Ubuntu was and still is many people’s intro to Debian based OSes, and it’s just not as user-centric as it used to be. Thankfully alternatives like Mint exist to bring it back a little bit for people who care.

I remember in college we had access to a Unix box via these computers that remoted into it. I don’t know the technical details, but I was able to log in with my account and it was presented as a GUI on my end. We used No Machine as the client if that’s relevant. I wonder how something like that can be set up.