Last time I checked, Davinci Resolve (which is fantastic, btw) is only officially supported on CentOS for some reason. There are guides/scripts that allege to make it work on other distros, but I had zero luck with them on Mint when I tried like a year ago.
It can also be extremely picky about what hardware it will run on. I actively use 3 different editors based on what tasks the project calls for since some things are just easier/faster with different programs. Kdenlive and Olive will get 90% of stuff done easily in my (admittedly limited) experience and installation for either is just using your package manager.
So I suggest you keep using windows, switch all your apps to open or closed source software that is available on linux. Learn them, use them and if you are in a pinch and need to use your windows only software it will still be there. Once you are at a point where you never use the windows only software you can then think of switching over to linux.
This is what I did in the 2000s. At one point I used all open-source software and my Windows was themed like GNOME. One sunny day Wine got fixed for Warcraft TFT. And then I switched to Ubuntu 5.04. With that said, today with the current hardware and software, lots more is palatable to run in a Windows VM. My wife has used MS Office and Adobe software in VMware Player for a decade now. Recently switched her to virt-manager. It’s just damn reassuring to know you can run pretty much all non-graphics intensive Windows workloads on demand. Even interfacing with pretty much any USB hardware, which is important for dealing with various arcane hardware.
I run real-time full band rehearsals with jamulus.io for low latency audio, plus any video tool of your choice (with the audio muted). we use muted Jitsi Meet for the video feed, but it really doesn’t matter. it’s all about the Jamulus audio
I think we should approach law as code. Leverage modern tools not unlike github to manage it collaboratively. We need an issue tracker and so on and so forth. Foss.
As someone mentioned we need task forces to tackle specific issues. Like representatives for a specific issue. These have to work together, but each has a specific goal and perspective with clear qualifiers and criteria.
Further, we shouldn’t all be running the same code. We need diversity in order to be resilient and to discover new possibilities. Some jurisdictions should be cutting edge and others conservative, so results can be compared.
Like, we need to stop using violence as a form of resolution between different systems. We need the tools to reason together. As someone mentioned we need clear qualifiers that express our values and interests, such as the happiness index.
Lastly, everyone should be able to get involved. I think nurses need to be involved in legislation surrounding healthcare. The tools need to be accessible for anyone, so it should most likely take a human form so it can properly communicate. Most likely some combination of specialized maintainers and LLMs.
I don’t understand the difficulty. My kid who used Windows for at least 7 years installed Ubuntu and just started using it. Why is this difficult for people? I helped him boot the computer from a USB stick and that’s it.
Here is the app store, install programs from here.
Yup, I think a lot of people just use their web browser for everything, and they can definitely just switch. Outside of work, how many non-techies have set up their email to use a native program? Very few, in my experience.
I think documents are sometimes the exception, since there’s a sizable (perhaps older) group that like to use Word for everything.
I switched as a kid too, but that makes it really easy because I never ended up depending on a bunch of proprietary Windows only apps. I never learned stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere, not even on pirated versions like most kids do. Photoshop CS2 technically ran under wine but the experience was so miserable I learned GIMP instead. My last Windows was XP.
The older you get the more “serious” software you have too, like tax stuff, the whole Windows-centered workflow at work. The deeper you are into the ecosystem the worse it is.
The issue I see over and over and over is not that using Linux in itself is that hard, it’s dealbreaker software and hardware. Oh your capture card isn’t supported. Your audio mixer’s not supported. It sucks. So basically what OP said: you have to switch to Linux friendly software first, then it’s basically just swapping the OS and not flipping your entire computing experience over.
My mom is 80 years old and I got her on Mint years ago - mostly because I was tired of fixing the mistakes Windows let her make.
My mom is a walking disaster with computers but she got used to it and now she can’t mess up anything, and she doesn’t worry about messing up anything anymore too. If she can do it, anyone can do it.
There’s also PyQt but it looks more complicated and I couldn’t find as nice and straightforward of an example as GTK but I found this: realpython.com/qt-designer-python/
If you want to go to C, GTK works about the same way. If you want C++, Qt is pretty good there.
Otherwise you can go SDL and just put whatever pixels you want on the screen on your own.
I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I'm afraid that's still the case.
Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you're ready, followed by "here's a bunch of alien concepts you don't know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it's all about the app alternatives."
I understand why this doesn't read that way to the "community", but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What's a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren't updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What's the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what's a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?
Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it's genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these "switch to Linux, it's fun!" guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that's great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that's not the reason people use Windows.
If you're on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it's all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don't particularly struggle with that). But if you're out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you're kinda missing the point of what's keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.
In fairness, this isn't the guide's fault, it's all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it out of the box and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You'll get to know whether that's for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way... at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!
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