I don’t understand what you’re arguing. You’re saying it is lower than 90%? How much lower are you thinking? What specifically is the percentage number in your mind where linux becomes “more viable”? And does it not matter whether it is just a bigger number than before?

Showing my age here, but my similar story was in #warezart on ethernet (IRC). We had a pretty tight group of regulars. I spent nearly every day there for over 5 years starting in 1995.

It was unusual then that we were from all over. We had a mod in New Zealand, some euros, a bunch of americans from all over and a handful of canadians. But hanging out like we were in each other’s living rooms.

A bunch of us actually met up in person at the Siggraph trade show once and even made matching tshirts. lol.

except for that one guy and his son

Or be even more productive and go…

“STAND UP AND GET OFF THE FUCKIN RAIL AND GO LIVE YOUR LIFE!!!”

For sure. I recall installing an open source mahjong from the android google store when I bought my first ever android device about a decade ago. Instantly took over my tablet and kept throwing ads at me. And it got into the root and wouldn’t go away when doing a reinstall. Fortunately it was a super cheap tablet that I only got to toy around with. But I have had no interest in ever getting another android device since then.

Yep. People have a bad habit of sticking to their habits beyond the point of usefulness. Myself included.

I think they would argue that it would be the perceived security that rust has. But I agree with your point and wonder if it will really deliver on those goals.

Didn’t know its been a whole decade.

The history of Microsoft creating backdoors in windows predates XP. While Windows XP is most certainly not as evil as Win10, it certainly never meant “freedom”. Nor did 95, NT or even 3.1. Other than the backdoors, windows has always been closed source. Nothing free about it.

The fact that the youtube person assumed the opposite strongly affects her credibility. Windows backdoors have been a common topic since the 90’s.

The rule of thumb is that you want at least the same amount of ram that you have (plus a little more just in case) if you have a laptop or similar where you’re going to use hibernate, since that works by moving whatever is in the ram into the swap.

Also, note that swap is basically emergency (and slow) ram. You want enough to handle any emergencies. Although I think it gets used before ram fills up completely. There are a lot of uses of ram where swap works just as well. Like if you got a program and/or browser tabs open in the background that you’re not presently using, it needs somewhere to store that data. And don’t forget about all the programs you may use that handle or process large files. Typically that gets loaded into ram (or direct to swap if fast access isn’t needed), and if ram can’t hold it, something that is used less is moved to swap.

But if there is no room, it keeps trying any way and it all freezes up like what op describes.

So… since people often have 16 gigs of ram in their machines, no, that isn’t a huge amount of swap to have. Even on my desktops I generally have at least 32 gigs swap just because I often do things that fill up a lot of ram. One of them has 64 gigs ram, and it can fill a good chunk of the swap as well if I try to render something heavy in Blender. Add on to that, I may have a vm open as well. That often uses swap along with filling ram. And of course general web use where it is normal to keep several tabs constantly open.

I want to make sure I have more swap than will ever be used. Because if it does get used, then that means it and ram is full and the computer will freeze.

yep. short for USB-diskette ;]

Is your swap big enough? Some installers default to only 1gig. That isn’t big enough normally.

If it fills the ram and the swap, it will cause what you are seeing. Typically the suggestion is a little more than however much ram you have. Personally I set it at either 16 or 32gigs or more. Depending on the machine and what I intend on doing with it and how much drive space I have available.

You can keep a system monitor open (or top, htop etc) and keep an eye on it when you’re doing something ram hungry, like having a bunch of browser tabs open or whatever. If it freezes and you look over and see the ram usage pegged to the top, that will suggest that that is your problem.

I’ve heard it is getting better. It would be worth downloading and trying a live-usb out and see where it is presently at.

Or just run a live disc.

It is so easy for everyone to just answer this question for themselves rather than read articles about it. And it takes about the same amount of time and effort.

Completely automatic should be one of the options. Not just ‘reminders’ and ‘don’t check’. I know that I used to use several years ago.

Thank you!! That is exactly what I was looking for.

That is a big help. I was stuck on the idea that that option wasn’t available when making a new doc and didn’t think to look under the change mode menu.

I think that as a photo editor, GIMP is the best option for open source. But as a print designer the lack of being able to work in CMYK and 1 bit images is a big problem.

Fortunately Krita does the CMYK thing extremely well, but it also lacks the ability to handle 1 bit images.

Wondering if anyone out there has discovered a lesser known open source app that works with 1 bit images well? Maybe something made for old school pixel art?

It seems strange to me, since even a more modern format like png supports 1 bit.

To be fair… that is more of a MS Paint kind of tool. I’ve been using Photoshop professionally for over 3 decades and I don’t think I have ever used it. It took me a bit just to find it just now. Don’t think I’ve ever used the rectangle tool either. A vector editing program like inkscape/illustrator or scribus/indesign are better tools for that kind of thing.

With that said. GIMP does have an ellipse selection tool, and that is something that I use often enough. And if you really wanted to draw a circle in a pixel pusher program you could just use that tool, invert it and delete on a separate layer.

I’ve been using Photoshop for over 20 years.

I hear ya. I’m a print designer and the biggest hole is scribus. It is impressive for how good it is in the last few years, but is no where close to where I need it to be for pro work compared to indesign.

But, I think Krita is definitely good enough to do what I need photoshop for… and Krita is better in some ways. Like for illustration work. Krita is better than GIMP for my uses because it has the strong color model functionality that GIMP doesn’t have. Mostly that would be the CMYK functionality. GIMP only exports to CMYK. You can’t work directly in it. You need that for print design.

Interestingly, the biggest problem is the whole “using Photoshop for over 20 years” (30 for me) thing.

After several years so much of what we do with these programs becomes second nature and we don’t have to think about it. Even if the other program is better, it takes a lot to get to that level with a new program. I’m trying to use Krita more and more and I still feel like I am no where close to that goal. albeit… somewhat closer…

While GIMP does have a clunky interface, I think part of that is that we just aren’t as familiar with it as the program we have been using for decades.

I don’t know what you use gimp for, but Krita might be worth a shot. Although I think if you only work in RGB and only do “photo shop” kind of tasks, GIMP may still be better.

I was one of those people who switched during the early Ubuntu days of 2006/2007.

First heard about it and gave it a try in 1995 when a friend told me about it in college. I was/am a graphics artist so it wasn’t an option then. But I knew then that it probably would eventually get there and windows would keep getting more evil and that I would switch. So I started switching from proprietary software solutions to open source whenever possible so that it would be easier to do when the day arrived.

So… in 2006 I was hearing a lot of talk about linux finally being easier to use and setup with a lot of gui functionality. Which is required for graphics work. Although, I had adobe at work and was there most of the week, so I didn’t really care anymore about having that at home. And the stuff I played around with was blender and the like.

I was also getting out of the habit of gaming. I had been really into FPS. Mainly the half-life mod “Day of Defeat” where I was doing the clam competition thing. But I burnt out on it and didn’t really care as much. But I did dual boot for a while with gaming in mind. It was about a year later when I realized that I hadn’t booted into Windows for several months (and I needed the hard drive space) that I scrubbed it.

So here I am.

I still use Ubuntu variations mostly. Although I intend on switching to Devuan. I’ve been experimenting with it on a laptop to get it just the way I want it before switching my desktops. I’m still struggling with btrfs snapshots. I thought I had it recently, then I broke it somehow. I’m still not entirely clear what the whole snapshot thing is doing. But I look forward to getting there soon. I hope to make this my final linux setup for the next decade at least.

Fair question.

It is something I turn off so I don’t remember for sure. Typically it comes up during the installation process. If your distro is using “Software Updater” it should be an option in it’s settings called “automatically check for updates”. This is on Ubuntu 25.04. Although it has been updated a few times from the version it was originally.

But whatever program is being used for updates should have options that will probably get you there.