Ugh. I'd love to switch to Linux, but as a designer, I'm stuck. It's not a lack of understanding of how it works— Before I was a designer I was a developer, worked in IT for a while, worked in upper-level support for a while, and Linux was my primary personal and professional OS from the late 90s to like 2010.
Why don't I just run a closed-source OS in a VM? They are fussy. Having some weird graphics tablet driver problem or something can really kill the creative connection between me and my work, and if I'm coming down to the wire on a deadline, it can cost me a contract.
What about tools that work natively on Linux? They generally just don't work for professional design use. Whenever I say that, a billion people always jump in and say "Gimp and VivaDesigner and Natron and XYZ and PDQ" work fine for me," and to my astonishment, they always seem surprised that the same just isn't true in most (any?) professional workflows. Sure, with varying amounts (usually non-trivial) of extra effort I can cobble together a disparate set of tools that might sometimes yield similar results to professional design programs, but it's going to take significantly more work to produce possibly lower-quality results, and that's just not an option for a pro. If you were hiring someone to craft the image of your company in a crowded, competitive marketplace, would you pay them more to take longer and potentially end up with a suboptimal product just because they were only using OSS to do it?
A software developer could feasibly use something like windows notepad or pine to achieve the same results as an IDE, or even a more powerful text editor like SublimeText. For many non-professionals, people just editing a config file, or people making the occasional shell script, it does work fine. Better even, considering that the extra baggage of complex tools would actually slow them down rather than speed them up.
Some things changed for the good the last couple of years.
I am programming on Ubuntu (C#, PHP, Javascript) with Jetbrains software. This works absolutely great.
For 3D work I use Blender.
But for graphical work I agree that there are still alternatives missing.
Figma is a very good alternative for Sketch. Scribus is a good alternative for Indesign. Krita is very good for concept art. But that's about it.
Inscape is a good alternative for Illustrator, but only if you work in RGB.
Gimp can do what Photoshop can but it will take you 3 times as long.
But for me the trade-offs work. I want to own my computer so I choose to work in Gimp instead of Photoshop. I also started to design websites directly with CSS. And I switched from 3DsMax to Blender (which isn't a trade-off anymore).
It's like 75% as good as Photoshop, which is pretty amazing for a JS app. I've found things like quality of masking refinement tools— an absolute must in my workflows— to be lacking.
I think Blender and Figma are good, professional tools. For the rest of them, I'm sure they work fine if you don't need to produce extremely polished stuff at volume— but they're not even close to good for that use case. (which is what my comment was about) I could see a UX Designer who works primarily in wireframes and such things getting by fine with linux, but not someone who works primarily in visuals.
As you can read in my comment I agree with you. For example working with text in Gimp is just horrible. And Inkscape is very good untill you need it for CMYK.
But this thread is about owning your PC. And then I think all those trade-offs can be overcome. Sometimes this means thinking in other directions. For example the choice to design in CSS instead of Photoshop.
I don't think you can say: 'I cannot get away from Apple'.
But you can say: 'I choose to stay at Apple because I think it is more convenient'.
I have tried in 2008 with Ubuntu Studio, after spilling coffee on my Powerbook G4, to work in Linux as a UI designer full time and people don't realised the power of Inkscape at the time. 2017 I have used only Ubuntu LTS with Gnome and Affinity Designer in Win VM, full year.
This time around I think that is possible, and economically solid, the move from Apple to ARM and closed walls of App Store to create conditions for real Linux Desktop Revolution.
Yeah, Inkscape is great. Maybe Linux works for working exclusively with on-screen assets? Not there if you do a lot of print work/layout. It's not that there aren't any tools for it, it's just that the tools aren't even close to as smooth or productive.
At least you’re stuck on a Mac. I do motion design and I’m stuck on windows because of stupid Apple vs nvidia beef and apple only allowing you to have a good gpu if you pay for Mac Pro with Xeon you don’t need and expensive memory you don’t need.
I'm assuming your use case doesn't require that much compute power so maybe you could use an old Mac just for work stuff and a Linux machine for everything else?
get 2 machines then. Who says you need to have a single machine for everything? Get a Mac for your design work, treat it like an appliance, and use Linux for everything else on another machine. Problem solved.
While I like your solution in principle, I can imagine it complicating life awfully...
People email you assets/images for use in your production work: are you going to get that on your 'designer' machine or on your Linux box? Most likely the latter, now you have to transfer it over to the 'work' box. Not technically difficult, but a definite speed-bump in your workflow. Awkward.
Your online document-sharing/demos (say Dropbox, whatever): is that from the work box? the utility box? both? Again, not technically a train-smash, but... awkward. A discontinuity that you'll have to deal with multiple times a day, a detour in your flow.
I can see why many would consider it too much of a hassle.
Why professional users don't complain? I unfortunately need to keep Windows machine for pro tools I use and it took me some time to remove any telemetry plus I can still see with Glasswire some apps are sending traffic. Usually I send an email to the software provider and ask what they send. Unfortunately some don't even reply and there is no OSS alternative, so there you go. I wish pirates went a step further and instead of hacking DRM also removed calls home and telemetry. Should mods should be legal if you have a full version and I would pay for such mods.
I agree that Gimp et al are terrible, but why not use Figma? It’s a great design tool, and thanks to it being browser-based you can use it on any platform, including Linux.
Freedom is hard, and thingsbcosts money if you're not willing to put willpower - more news at 11
Jokes aside you don't have to do it if you're scared, and if you want to try you can always switch back and forth between machines / OSs so you use the most suited environment according to the limits of context and the job you need to do.
Much like you can aim at 0% environment pollution by gradually removing excess stuff instead of going full off the grid, you don't have to do a radical move. Use the tools you need for the job, aiming at result production while keeping a liquid approach.
Depending on your skills, willpower, effort, and willingness to abandon uninventive corporations you can be faster and more efficient. You're just not feeling comfortable investing time and effort, which is a sacred choice.
Please consider that things have changed since 2019, VMs support of tablets and color grading tools are a breeze and using tools that your competitors are scared to use will make you innovative. Godspeed~
Why don't I just run a closed-source OS in a VM? They are fussy. Having some weird graphics tablet driver problem or something can really kill the creative connection between me and my work, and if I'm coming down to the wire on a deadline, it can cost me a contract.
What about tools that work natively on Linux? They generally just don't work for professional design use. Whenever I say that, a billion people always jump in and say "Gimp and VivaDesigner and Natron and XYZ and PDQ" work fine for me," and to my astonishment, they always seem surprised that the same just isn't true in most (any?) professional workflows. Sure, with varying amounts (usually non-trivial) of extra effort I can cobble together a disparate set of tools that might sometimes yield similar results to professional design programs, but it's going to take significantly more work to produce possibly lower-quality results, and that's just not an option for a pro. If you were hiring someone to craft the image of your company in a crowded, competitive marketplace, would you pay them more to take longer and potentially end up with a suboptimal product just because they were only using OSS to do it?
A software developer could feasibly use something like windows notepad or pine to achieve the same results as an IDE, or even a more powerful text editor like SublimeText. For many non-professionals, people just editing a config file, or people making the occasional shell script, it does work fine. Better even, considering that the extra baggage of complex tools would actually slow them down rather than speed them up.