As a daily driver through most of university. Sadly the hardware got way too expensive for what it did, at least for a while. These days it might be better again but I won’t buy an MBP to replace a laptop that’s only a year old.

Cool. Can you help me solve mine so I don’t have them either?

Thanks for the long reply, lots of stuff to unpack here that I might have to come back to later. Might be helpful.

So for now, let me focus on your question about my photography workflow. I mostly do event photography (discos, concerts, conventions) but also occasionally studio and travel stuff.

When I come home from a shoot, I copy my photos to a network drive on my home server (running Ubuntu) which automatically gets backed up to an off-site NAS. As a first step, I use Bridge to label which photos I want to edit for myself, which for a potential client, which not at all. Nothing special, just running through all RAWs and marking them with star or color labels. For the editing step itself, I start out with Camera Raw. First an overall pass with lens correction, cropping/straightening, brightness adjustments (exposure, contrast, blacks/darks/lights/whites), white balance, dehaze, curves, whatever the photo needs. Then, depending on the subjact, a more in depth pass with spot removal and masked adjustments. Automatic subject masking has been a great time saver. If I need to go even more in depth (usually only for photos that go to an exhibition), I start editing in photoshop. As a last step, I use Photoshop Image processor to bulk export JPGs in the needed size and quality, optionally with a watermark.

(for those familiar with Adobe’s tools, you might be wondering why I don’t use Lightroom instead. In the past I’ve had problems with accessing the same library from different machines. This could probably be fixed but my current setup works fine so I never bothered)

For long term library management, I run immich on my home server which lets me tag and filter my photos as much as I want.

As for the Blender thing, I think I phrased that weirdly. It was not related to a specific problem or my photo editing process. It was just an example for a piece of software that started out with horrible developer-user UI and got a lot better when they completely redid the UI in 2.8.

Regarding Photoshop in Wine: unfortunately, missing GPU support is probably a no-go when dealing with 6000x4000 pixel, 14 bits per channel raw photos.

Also a tiny bit amusing that within 24 hours, it was rated it both “Garbage: It launches, that about it.” and “Silver: it pretty much works well with a few caveats.”

One of my first experiences with linux was gentoo back in ~2006 so patience is not an issue. Documentation that requires you to already know what you need to do is a problem though and the exact reason why I haven’t touched proper Arch so far.

The right choice doesn’t help me if I can’t get my literal job done and have to give up half of my hobbies.

Why?

I don’t ask that to talk you out of it. I like desktop Linux. I’m typing this on desktop Linux. I’ve been using desktop Linux for most of my adult life. I ask because your reasons will inform the advice people can give you.

Because enshittification is becoming more and more unbearable. So far, Windows 10 (and to some extent even Windows 11) works for me but it’s getting worse and worse every year. I have no interest in OneDrive, Copilot, Recall and whatever MS wants to sell me next. I’d rather have a system that does exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less. On servers and embedded systems, linux has done a great job for me over the last 20 (!) years.

Another option is to run Windows in a VM for those apps.

Kind of defeats the purpose if I run my two most-used applications in a Windows VM, doesn’t it?

I’m more than open for using something different and learning a different workflow as long as I can eventually get to the point where I can get roughly the same results in roughly the same time. I like tinkering with stuff and I’m not even opposed to write my own tools for closing a few gaps in the applications I use (see my recently started immichtools). But there is a limit. I just can’t afford to spend half my day working around problems that I wouldn’t have had on Windows.

Edit: formatting

What you’re proposing is exactly how I got to the point where I’m writing this post. My servers are mostly Ubuntu, apart from a couple of Pis that run Debian. So naturally, I’ve tried Ubuntu, Mint and Pop!_OS. I can’t remember exactly which desktop environments I’ve tried over the years but at least Gnome, KDE, XFCE and Cosmic. Probably more.

When that didn’t work out, I tried Fedora and even some Arch-based distro (I think it was EndeavourOS).

Each time I ran into the same frustrations. Stuff didn’t work and troubleshooting consisted more of filtering which guides are actually applicable to my current combination of software than actually solving the problem.