 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today is going to be a little bit of a ranty, rambly, nonsense type video. One of the things that every Linux fanatic, enthusiast, evangelist, whatever, asks themselves or gets asked a lot is, why isn't Linux more popular? And there are so many answers. There's the answer of not enough marketing. Canonical's not out there doing ads on the TV about Linux or whatever. There's the whole momentum of Windows argument where Windows is just so big it'd be hard to break through unless something terrible happened to Windows argument. There's the, it's just too hard to install argument. There's the idea that Linux is, I don't know, more attuned to servers or whatever, which I suppose is a good argument or could be a good argument. The argument that is probably the most popular or the most agreed with is that the software on Linux is just not as good or is just not available as much as it is on Windows and Mac OS. And that's a good argument. For years and years, the argument really, really, truly focused on games. And that was a big downside of Linux because if you wanted to game, you had to dual boot. You had to have HEPA Linux computer around so you could play your AAA video games. And that's not so much the case anymore. With Proton and Vulkan and everything that Steam has done for video games and the introduction of Stadia and GeForce Now or whatever it's called, it also allows Linux users to pretty much play any game they want on Linux. And it's fantastic. There's a few exceptions and there's a few things that you have to, few hoops you have to jump through if you want to have a true, a very good experience on Linux when it comes to games. And even, so that takes care of the gaming thing. And then the other area of software that was always missing or whatever on Linux was the word, Microsoft Office and a lot of the Microsoft programs. That's not as big of a deal anymore because there are really good open source alternatives. And also Microsoft has started to bring some of their applications like Teams and Skype and stuff to Linux natively. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see Microsoft Word and the rest of the Office suite on Linux eventually as well because Microsoft seems to have kind of warmed up to Linux in the last few years. So that leaves kind of one big category that is still unrepresented, I guess, in Linux. And that's the graphical and media editing suite that is predominantly ruled by Adobe. Now, I'm not a big Adobe fan. I don't know anybody who uses Linux who is. But you can't deny that a lot of their stuff is pretty good, Photoshop is good. When I first started making podcasts, I edited all of my stuff in Audition. And then when I went to switch to Linux, I had to start using Audacity and man, did I miss Audition. There's just so much more you can do in Audition than you can do in Audacity. And it's just, I mean, look, we can switch over to my main screen here. This is Audition or no, this is Audacity, excuse me. And it's just, I've come to like it. I've come to even enjoy using it, but it's not as intuitive, it's not as full-featured as Audition was. And the same thing for Photoshop. GIMP is not a true Photoshop replacement. It's just not, you have to use Photoshop in conjunction with other things like Inkscape or whatever. For example, in GIMP, there's not even a ShapeMaker tool. I mean, even Microsoft Word has a ShapeMaker tool, but GIMP does not. You have to do things with, you know, selections and stuff, it's just not the same. So the point of today's video is, you know, what Adobe Creative Cloud is missing from Linux, it's not on Linux at all. There's no, if you wanna get it running, you could try to do it in Wine. Usually when you try to do that in Wine, you have to use a really old version before the Creative Cloud stuff came out when they were still releasing just standalone software. And, you know, that means you're not getting all the true features, you're probably using something that's kind of insecure. And, you know, that's, you know, not a great experience. And it's definitely not something that somebody who's just, you know, wants to edit photos can actually jump through those hoops to do. So they're either left with staying on Windows where they can use the software that they're familiar with, or they can switch to Linux and use something like GIMP or Photoshop or, you know, Inkscape, not Photoshop, Inkscape or Shotwell, I think is another one that's around. Same thing with video idioms. So with video editing suites, there's Premiere for Adobe, you have to use Kaden Live on Linux. And I've come to like Kaden Live, but it's still not as full-featured as Premiere is. Now granted, it's free and open source. So what it is is very impressive considering that, you know, not only do you not have to pay for it, but it's, you know, something that you could fork and create, you know, an offshoot of if you wanted to. It's really cool, right? So the question at the beginning is why isn't Linux more popular? I feel that all the other arguments that I went through there at the beginning can be overlooked. The hardship of installing isn't, it's not as hard as it used to be. You know, gaming has taken care of itself, even a lot of the Microsoft, you know, office arguments have taken care of itself. The marketing even has kind of increased because now you have first-party hardware vendors like Dell and Lenovo and HP actually making Linux laptops and putting them on their stores, you know. So while those problems are no longer, you know, an issue really, Adobe continues to be the stumbling block for Linux popularity. And there's two ways we can look at this. We can either sit here and say, well, we're just gonna wait until Adobe eventually brings it to Linux, which I don't think is ever going to happen. I would love to be proven wrong, but I just don't think it is ever going to happen. Or we could say we need true alternatives to, you know, Photoshop and Premiere and Audition and stuff. And we have those things kind of. So like if we, let's just close this and open a GIMP. This is GIMP. And I love that that opened up so fast because it's not always that fast. Yeah, this is fine. There's things you can do here that you could do in Photoshop. And I think I have Inkscape as well. This is Inkscape. I'm not sure why GIMP does not play well with the tiling layout in DWM. That's really weird. I have a feeling it's something has to do with the default rule for it. Anyways, and that goes Inkscape. Apparently that was a delayed quit. Anyways, so there are alternatives on Linux, but they're not as good as what Adobe offers. So in order to get past the stumbling block of Adobe software, we have to either wait for them to bring it to Linux or we have to have true alternatives. And right now we don't have true alternatives. So the stumbling block is going to remain as long as those two things continue to be true. The question is, does it matter enough to the Linux community to actually change, to make the change necessary in order to overcome the lack of Adobe software? And so far the answer to that has been no. I mean, yes, GIMP exists and yes, GIMP is still being developed, but it's not moving in a sufficient pace to make a sense, not sense, but it's not moving at a sufficient pace to actually be useful enough, I guess. I don't know. Same thing with Inkscape. Inkscape is well maintained, but it doesn't have that momentum that it would need in order to successfully see the development to actually be on par with something like Illustrator. And Kaden Live is probably the closest thing because it is, it does have a lot of really good momentum and it does a lot of good things and every year you see new features and new bug fixes and stability patches and all that stuff. So Kaden Live is probably on the trajectory, hard word, where it could possibly go through and someday be kind of on the same level as Premiere. And there are like the only thing we have on Linux in free and open source land that can be compared really well to what Adobe can do is Blender. And I think I do actually have Blender installed. I don't know why I have Blender installed, but I do have Blender. The reason why I don't know why I have Blender installed is because I have no clue how to use Blender. I would love to learn how to use Blender, but it's so complicated and there are not very many good new level tutorials out there on Blender. And that's okay because this is a piece of software that shows what is possible on Linux when developers try to push past the, well, we need a photo editing tool. So let's just put together a photo editing tool and once we have it, that's the lowest common denominator meant. We don't have to push past that and make it excellent. Same thing with auto editing and software. Audacity has existed for two decades, maybe more. It's the lowest common denominator. They've reached it, it's been created and while it's still maintained for bug fixes and stuff, there's no motivation or momentum to push it to the next level to make it excellent, to make it good enough to compete with something like Audition for Adobe or any of the other closed sourced audio editing stuff. But Blender, Blender has a lot of support as it's used not just on Linux but also on Windows and Mac. And it compares favorably to everything else that it competes against and the Blender people, the developers behind Blender, continue to push Blender to higher and higher levels and that's something that you just don't see with Audacity or CadenLive even really, or GIMP, especially, GIMP really is the, I mean, I'm not disparaging the developers behind GIMP because they've done a good job, they've done a service for the Linux community because we have GIMP, having it is better than not having it but it just feels like they've created it and there's no motivation or incentive really for them to say, hey, you want to what? Let's go through and build something that is just as good at Photoshop, that's open source, that works well on Linux and other platforms and that doesn't cost 60 or $70 a month. Now, I understand when I make these criticisms, I understand that that kind of motivation takes money, it takes resources that the developers behind GIMP don't probably have and that's probably the biggest stumbling block towards my dream of a true Photoshop alternative on Linux from happening because it takes money and Adobe has money but people behind GIMP probably don't have money, so I understand when I make the criticisms of not having the motivation or whatever for them to take GIMP and Audacity and Caden live to the next level that truly it's the resources that are holding them back and the thing is this is where I'm going to kind of Linux users have a very, I'm going to say, dumb attachment to the word free and this is free as in beer. If your program on Linux isn't free as in beer, it's not going to get used and that is really the bottom line of where Linux is going to stumble. It's going to remain behind the wall of Adobe software because everyone who, if you're willing to pay for something, chances are you're just going to use Adobe. If you're not willing to pay, you're going to be stuck with these mostly mediocre tools and Linux users don't want to pay and Linux developers know this, right? They know that their audience isn't going to shell out 10, 20, 30, $45 a month for a software tool. It's just for the most part that's not going to happen. If GIMP started charging or introduced a paid tier tomorrow, nobody would, I mean very, very few people would go through and spend that money. Same thing with Audacity, same thing with Caden live, you know, those organizations get their money through donations from large groups like the Linux Foundation or the EFF or whatever. That's where they get their money from. Grants usually. They don't get their money from the users and I think the bottom line is that until some kind of cultural revolution happens where Linux users might be a little bit more willing, I would be the first in line to pay some money to GIMP, to Caden live, to Audacity if I had the promises, I guess, that software was going to reach the level of something that Adobe offers, but I'm very much in the minority I think there. So just kind of sum up. Audacity is never going to come to Linux and we can't, as Linux enthusiasts and evangelists or whatever, we can't sit around waiting for that. We need to take the software that we do have and push it to the next level, but I think part of that is going to be overcoming the whole freezing beer problem where we just don't want to pay for stuff. And that's a... I don't want to say it's an insurmountable problem, but I think for the most part, Linux is kind of a lot like Android, so when you look at the revenues for the Android app store versus the Apple app store, you see that Apple makes a whole bunch more money, their developers make a whole bunch more money because people on iOS are much more willing to pay for their apps than, you know, people on Android. And Linux suffers for the same thing. They're much less likely to pay for apps than somebody who uses Windows or Mac. So, it's just a... Like I said, it was a rambly type video. You know, it... It, you know... I love Linux. I want to see Linux succeed. I want to succeed. I want to see more and more people using Linux. And it bothers me a little bit that, you know, one of the things that people argue that, you know, the reason why I don't use Linux is because Adobe's not there. Well, you know, we do have these tools, and they try these tools. I don't say, like, but it's not just... it's not as good. And that's, you know, I want Linux to be as good. And same thing with all the software on Linux. I want to be... I want somebody to come from Windows and use open source tools and say, you want to run it? That's just as good an experience as, you know, Photoshop. Different, yeah. But just as good. And until that happens, you know, Linux is not going to be, you know, anywhere where it's not already right now. So anyways, that is it for this little... I managed to somehow get 20 minutes out of that rant. If you want to... If you like this, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't, give it a thumbs down. You can support the channel in any number of ways. You can like us on Facebook. You can follow us on Twitter. You can also hit the subscribe button, which is, you know, the least effort you could do if you've made it this far. We really do appreciate everybody who subscribes. You can also support us monetarily. 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