this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
400 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
49746 readers
1054 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Year of the Linux desktop anyone?
The same user posted a thread in this comm about the Linux equivalent, device-id, which is possibly more problematic.
https://lemmy.ml/post/49710604
Seems like the answer is never. The masses are too addicted to PC games to give it up.
It's not the PC games keeping people so much. Proton solved a lot of that problem. It's inertia.
Most people don't care about things. They just don't. Their brains just don't have the juice.
A lot is professional software. Many people have one or two pieces of software they use a lot which doesn't run on Linux.
This is my issue. There are two specific pieces of software that only run on Windows. Even worse, there is one program that only runs on Mac. So in order to properly do my job, I need to maintain both a Windows laptop and a Mac. And ditching them is virtually impossible, because the Windows machine is used to control/configure a lot of gear, and the Mac program is an industry standard program that virtually every technician is expected to know.
I don't think that's actually very many people. Not for their personal computers. Most people don't run much more than a web browser, if they don't play games.
People tend to use the stuff they're already used to. They could probably use Linux but if they buy a Laptop which has Windows preinstalled and they're used to Windows it's hard to get them to make the jump
Right. Inertia is the metaphor I used to express that idea.
i miss photoshop. not enough to boot into my windows partition, but it sure would be nifty if it would just work on linux. krita is decent but danggit, not the same
You prefer Krita over GIMP for photoshopping tasks?
i got both but decided to first learn krita as i like drawing more than image manipulation. though i'll be needing to hop into gimp soon i feel, as krita's text editing options are clunky at best
Dark room is another open source alternative.
darkroom is the open source alternative to lightroom, both are vastly different from photoshop
But if you were a professional photoshopper I'd imagine you wouldn't work with Krita all day.
as in i didn't used to work with krita all day or i wouldn't be working with krita all day now?
You wouldn't work with Krita all day right now
well i used photoshop for a solid 8 years so i'd consider myself at the very least an advanced amateur
i don't need it for work right now, but i used to
It's nifty on Windows where I can run all kinds of other professional productivity programs. I went back to Windows because Linux can't deliver and likes to break on updates. -Someone that loves CLI and didn't mind that about it.
The bigger problem is that most people just aren't up for installing an OS themselves. I've certainly never had the chutzpah to replace Android, and I'm more tech savvy than most
100%. I think a lot about one of my friends when trying to think about that kind of user. Smart lady. Advanced degree. Has her life together. Would absolutely not want to try to install an OS. Wouldn't even know how to start.
But I'm confident if I handed her a Linux laptop, she'd use it just the same as a Mac or Windows machine.
Linux is PC...
Also you can play almost all games on linux
And in some cases they run better then on windows.
true, although the opposite is also sometimes true. Really it's mostly the same experience on a much less bloated OS that's highly configurable.
I agree. But I think more to the other side of it. I worry that a vast influx, who don't care about privacy and computing freedom, would make for huge market pressure to lock down Linux. Same way we see Windows, IOS, Android locked.
Game co's, big tech, and others will demand it, if the masses flee to Linux. Today, most Linux users go nah, we want freedom more than your AAA game. If that changes, we could lose the very culture that resists locked down corporate controlled computing.
Gaming hasn't been an issue for years
There are certain games that refuse to enable anticheat on Linux. So if you play one of those games, you’re forced to use Windows. But that isn’t Linux’s fault. It’s simply the game makers refusing to enable Linux support. Multiple game devs have even stated that it’s basically an “enable on Linux” checkbox on their end, but the publishers want that sweet kernel-level access on Windows.
I have tried over and over for 30 years now and every time I discover something is missing, something I’m not willing to give up. Today it was Google Drive. There are multiple solutions for Linux to mount Google Drive as a folder in the local filtersystem, none of them offer decent performance compared to the windows client. Every time I try Linux something like this comes up.
could you elaborate on what you mean by "performance" of cloud storage? the speed of upload, download?
The time it takes to open and list a directory using Nautilus in GNOME desktop. It can take 5-10 seconds with a directory of 5 files, a lot longer if there are 50 files in a directory. And all the "solutions" I find on the web involve some kind of guesswork and tweaking settings left and right, hoping to somehow hit a magic combination that works.