[rullrich]

I can build a desktop machine, but sitting there trying to work out a program can be frustrating.

Very much true of cause, and as kenspo said there's a lot to miss (for pros) when switching to linux. But if Your not a pro and if your on a budget and still would like high-quality software linux is at least worth a try, especially when You take Adobes pricing / subscription models into account.

[beachgardener]

is at least worth a try

most definately and is why i do sometimes take bites at the darktable pie, not so much gimp, i get too frustrated with gimp,

[bobD]

not so much gimp, i get too frustrated with gimp,

Meet the Gimp is a lovely gentle series of video blogs that covers from basics to specialist uses...
The older shows are here...
Getting the older shows | Meet the GIMP!
Contents page for reference here...
Table of Contents | Meet the GIMP!

Current series here..
Meet the GIMP! | Video tutorials for GIMP and other free graphics programs

[beachgardener]

thanks mate

[cmar]

Another Linux user here since 1998, pretty much all the programs mentioned here either have a close Linux equivalent or some will run on Linux under Wine. MS program compatibility is not the isssue it once was. I've got a copy of Win 7 I use to play the odd game but really after Win 7, Microsoft just seemed to loose the plot, and no longer care about it's customers or what they wanted, they are only interested in forcing on them what Microsoft wants.
Many people, even game developers also think this, one reason why developer Valve, now has a Linux client, and it's own variant of Linux Os. I've seen Linux grow up from the early Red Hat days in the late nineties to a force to be reckoned with, it's just not as in your face as Windows. Apple Mac OS, Chrome OS, and Android are all Linux derivatives, most of the world's web servers run on Linux, many scientific instruments use embedded Linux code, because of it's stability, and freedom from viruses and restrictive licencing. There are so many Linux variants out there now that if you don't happen to like one - just try another!

[wombat2go]

I am all fedora here, since 2008, except for an old XP used as host for film scanners via vnc.
Most of the machines here are on Fedora 13 32 bit or Fedora 14 X86_64, which have been very reliable for remote servers and industrial use.

The fun/development/photo computer here is up to Fedora 20, and I have it set up for Truecolor 10 bit with Nvidia Quadro to an Eizo SX2762W.
I have the main open photo processing apps on there, using 16 bit tifs , but I am waiting for Gimp16 which I hope retains the simple old menu bar.
Some applications and browsers, video etc don't yet run on truecolor and it is necessary to switch back to 8 bit, which is a nuisance, requiring restart of X server which loses all the work in progress.

I see that the Fedora 21 upgrades are focussed on graphics, OpenCL.
So I will be upgrading to fedora 21 soon, partly to explore running the (day job) numerical solvers on the GPUs, on OpenCL.

[alexcox]

Photomatix - the HDR software - is also available for GNU/Linux. It processes all RAW formats (unlike Photoshop) and you can apply various intensities to pull info out of the shadows and highlights. It also does not apply any software "fixes" for specific lenses, so you may end up with more information on the edges of the frame than you'd get from a regular RAW conversion.

If you try Ubuntu and don't like the rather pedestrian "Unity" desktop, try Mint, a very good desktop OS!

[antoniomontag]

most definitely, most of my main skills are from the film days. Adapting to computers is time consuming, some imaging courses around are Adobe related, sitting in on them gives some skills, but learning all over again to adapt that to other programs like Darktable and Gimp are time consuming (sometimes I get stuck with terminology and the look of the layout), but we will get there in the end
Much different to installing an operating system and using a desktop in a simple way. I can build a desktop machine, but sitting there trying to work out a program can be frustrating.

Running Linux (Fedora 21) on my computers, my son runs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on his laptop and we are not missing Windows in any flavour: stability, safety and freedom makes a great software.
Not missing Photoshop replaced by GIMP. And software quality is far in front of equivalent MS products

[ablundon]

I use Linux for my storage servers and backup solutions but Win 7 for my main working PC. Two reasons mostly. Firstly is and most importantly is the ability to run VBA Macros in MS Office products. My work uses Windows and MS Office and many of the spreadsheets written use VBA. As far as I know there is no Linux product that supports VBA.

Secondly is Lightroom... I'm not sure if there are any Linux programs that have all the capabilities and features as Lightroom.... however, I've only spent a little time searching mostly since I know I'm stuck to Windows for the 1st reason.

[rullrich]

Secondly is Lightroom... I'm not sure if there are any Linux programs that have all the capabilities and features as Lightroom.... however, I've only spent a little time searching mostly since I know I'm stuck to Windows for the 1st reason.

If you are looking for features and capabilities I'd say darktable is ahead by now. But since there is no version for win You have to go MAC oder Linux. But anyway there are things where LR is still leading (highlight and shadow recovery for example), even if darktable catches up quickly. And I'd say it's also fast, LR being a ressource monster getting worse with every incarnation.

[boriscleto]

Even for photography Linux has all I need. I am a big fan of Photivo for raw development, and Gimp can substitute Photoshop. The main big issue with Gimp is that 16-bit per channel is not yet fully supported, but it will be with the upcoming 3.0 release..

I've been hearing about this upcoming 3.0 release since I bought my Mac mini in 2009.

@ZoeB if you want to find out if Linux can handle your workflow download the Mac versions of darktable and GIMP. Pretty much everything is available for Mac OS or can be compiled with MacPorts.

The MacPorts Project -- Download & Installation

[Volker76]

I have left Windows behind in the last millenium. And I am not missing anything. Darktable works fine for me. Found it really easy to use.

[Quicksand]

Darktable is pretty good, I agree. But it's fiddly. Some operations that are trivial in programs like Lightroom (e.g., add a little color noise reduction) can be pretty tedious in Darktable (add at least two instances of noise reduction modules, one profiled denoise, color blend mode, reduce the strength a bit, another wavelet module, blah blah blah). There are, I think, five different kinds of noise reduction modules in Darktable, and it's up to you to figure out what modules and what parameters will work best for you.

If you find a set of parameters you like, you can save them as a module preset and that will be quicker to apply. But even after many hours of experimentation, I was never able to find a combination of denoise tools/settings in Darktable that worked for general purpose NR as well, for me, as just grabbing the slider in Lightroom. In particular I could never identify a module or combination of modules for high-ISO strong NR that didn't color-shift my images.

And I have found that the five basic tone sliders in Lightroom (blacks, shadows, exposure, highlights, whites) are more intuitive and natural than the counterparts in Darktable, which seem (again, to me!) to require more iterative adjustment and compensation to get a pleasing result.

Finally, I think Lightroom does a better job with dust spot removal.

Darkroom is pretty good if the user has sufficient patience to do some significant tinkering, repeatedly. If you just want to get down to the business of photo editing with significant throughput, I believe there are better choices, and Lightroom is mine.

So, even though I have been a majority-Linux user for about a decade, I still keep a Windows installation around just to run Lightroom (and on occasion, Microsoft Office). I run it in a virtual machine so I don't have to dual boot, but I don't necessarily recommend this approach because it has some disadvantages. (To name one: VMware Player, which is free for non-commercial use, has some rudimentary graphics acceleration. It's enough to let Windows do its Aero interface, and it's fine for that. But it's not good enough to accelerate Lightroom 6.)

Anyhow, that's my two cents. I just paid to upgrade to Lightroom 6 because it simply works better for me, and it's worth the annoyance of keeping a Windows installation around. I wish that weren't the case, but oh well.

I'm pretty results-oriented these days, and I have occasionally mentally tossed around the idea of just switching back to Windows to avoid the hassle factor. But every now and then stuff like this will slap some sense back into me and remind me why I switched away in the first place.

[lightbox]

So, even though I have been a majority-Linux user for about a decade, I still keep a Windows installation around just to run Lightroom (and on occasion, Microsoft Office). I run it in a virtual machine so I don't have to dual boot, but I don't necessarily recommend this approach because it has some disadvantages. (To name one: VMware Player, which is free for non-commercial use, has some rudimentary graphics acceleration. It's enough to let Windows do its Aero interface, and it's fine for that. But it's not good enough to accelerate Lightroom 6.)

I do it the other way around: Windows 7 natively, and Arch linux in a VM (I use VirtualBox). I use the VM for all the linux-y things (development, servers, OpenVPN), and that lets all the Windows-y things (Lightroom, games) run natively with full access to the graphics hardware.

Arch + XFCE is surprisingly very fast in a VM.

[domusofsail]

I've been hearing about this upcoming 3.0 release since I bought my Mac mini in 2009.

But if you own a Mac mini you don't need to worry about Gimp at all, Adobe is your friend
I'll keep on waiting release 3.0 :-(