Pewdiepie becoming an arch-pilled rice-maxxer who advocates Linux for freedom and gaming has surely had some effect. He's such a good sport he even swore off Photoshop and tries to learn to like Gimp.
Or maybe Microsoft continuously degrading their user's experiences has finally reached a breaking point, to the point where Pewdipie AND Linus Tech Tips are talking more seriously about linux.
So yeah Pewdiepie is part of it, but I honestly think that's only because Microsoft has done such a poor job at maintaining their operating system.
If I am reading the room right, I think Wine/Proton/Steam making gaming almost effortless on linux has been the big swing. It was not like this 5 years ago.
I have been a linux user for work for a decade, but still ran Windows for a gaming PC. But with Win11 dropping the ball so hard, and the general hype around Proton and where linux gaming was it, it was not hard to make the decision to switch.
Same here. Been using Linux personally for about a decade, professionally for half of that. I still ran a GPU passthrough Windows 11 VM for games up until a couple months ago. I am now switching to running everything purely in Linux, and it's great. Night and day difference between what it used to be like 5 years ago for sure.
Certainly Microsoft is responsible for most of it. I'm just saying Felix still has a lot of influence and has been pulling in the same direction to his millions of fans.
Things I hadn't had on my bingo cards, in this or any universe: Me really looking forward to a new PewDiePie video! Guy has become a wholesome tech entertainment retreat for me. It's like Martijn Doolaard, but Linux instead of Alps... I can't stress enough how wholesome and pleasant the content has become. Or maybe it's been always like that, and I was just an ignorant snob...
Granted, I have SponsorBlock installed, so the occasional predatory supplement stuff gets cut, but he also kinda made clear he's rich enough and not in it for the money anymore - and I tend to believe him. PewDiePie won life, chose sanity and took the anti-corruption path. Bless him and his family, and God please, let it be real!
Yes, Krita is definitely my preference, and aseprite for pixel art work (not open source, but source available and free of cost if you choose to build it yourself.)
GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, just like Photoshop is.
Correction: GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, but not nearly as bad as Photoshop because it is organized logically and isn't burdened with sacred historical cruft, advertisements and product tie-ins.
The difference is that once you learn Photoshop it is a skill you can use at many jobs, and GIMP is not. Using this post as an excuse to rant, I've always thought that GIMP's priorities should be to be usable for print (mainly color management, which I think is almost totally fixed and becoming smooth) and to improve compatibility between it and vector drawing software (like Illustrator/Inkscape[0]), and layout software (like InDesign/Scribus[1].)[2]
If you're a European government or an individual rich person and you are really serious about software independence from the US, or if you're China/Russia/etc. and we know you're serious about it, you should throw about 50M at the problem. I think it would threaten Adobe so much that the US might lob a missile at you.
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[0] Inkscape also hated print, and the possibility of real exact colors and real exact measurements, and basically prioritized web icons and art. They also have a UI that requires a ton of memorization of hotkeys (which was part of the motivation for creating the software in the first place.) They seem to have wised up and made serious improvements in all of those areas.
[1] The only problem that Scribus has is a clunky UI that requires a lot of unnecessary clicks, which makes me suspect that it has deeper architectural problems. I think very few people work on it. It's ideally positioned, in the age of all books being online data, to create/become the future typesetting standard for people who want definitive versions of books rather than flowy ebook things which are not a significant improvement over .txt files. You could take a classic book and encode its typesetting, and rather than having 10M of blurry page scans combined with OCR info, you could just have 500K of text, fonts and typesetting information. With this, you could professionally print a perfect copy of the book, and as it looked when it was printed originally.
[2] Inkscape and Scribus, in turn, should be concentrating on pdf compatability, and also a way to sneak into print shops would be to write a good FOSS imposer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition) that integrated well with Inkscape/Scribus.
krita looks great! I'm not a hugely creative person, so last time I spent time to learn a graphics tool that was gimp in the early 2010s. But I used krita last week to test my convertibles's pen (Dell PN7552W, on Linux of course). Pleasant experience overall, and utterly amazing how far krita came in the last decade.
If you're coming from photoshop then PhotoGIMP is a good patch for gimp. I never understood why GIMP just didn't take this approach to begin with or at least make it a built in option.
ahh...
Now I'm connecting it to the 1990's car culture, where people modified Hondas and Toyotas... That's the term we used. I didn't really remember it, especially since political correctness wasn't prevalent back then.
