Maybe. In any case I try to never infer someone's tone from text interactions since it's always faulty and lacks human dimension. By default I just assume people actually mean what they write. I think we get (on average) more aggressive, and tend to show less empathy when not talking face to face.

Also... The term "American left-wing" is offensive for a Marxist like myself. :D

In the old days laptops were rare and accessible only to selected few. The others in the background were just admiring the flawless handwork the arch user is displaying with the command line.

I used WPS, it was worse than Libre from the usability, plus quite bloated with all sorts of stuff (luckily, I don’t have to pay for the Office, and will never actually do that willingly). Haven’t used the other two, however, will have a look, thanks!

Both GIMP and Krita are very nice and decent, just not powerful enough for many things I need photoshop for. Inkscape is actually much closer to Illustrator (not as powerful, but still), so that might be the only one with the “getting used to it” issue.

Actually, one other thing I should have mentioned, is that I also transited from using Premiere Pro to Kdenlive (and sometimes even Blender for very light video editing). Kdenlive is an amazing success story for KDE, hope that happens to Krita as well.

PS. The name GIMP sounds amazing! Love it, they should never change it )

totally understand it. it took me about a full day to setup everything the way i liked (i'm also quite picky when it comes to usability), but honestly the next time i do it, i can probably do it in a couple of hours, since i now know all the ins and outs.

I very much hope so too!!! i made myself to drift away from the Fusion 360 (they just took it a step further by moving a lot of stuff to the cloud) towards the FreeCad, and am enjoying its capabilities ever since. hope the same happens to GIMP. and it's not about getting used to it after Photoshop, it just really lacks some of the basic functionality i absolutely need.

like i mention in one of the comments: UI is a dealbreaker for me. oftentimes i have to make complicated annotations, arrows going from one plot to another, combine shapes to make schematic illustrations. i can do all that in a vector editor, sure, but having it all in one place speeds things up considerably.

Yes, i tried remark. I often use markdown-based solutions when i give a more code-centric presentation. But for other purposes, when I want to make annotations on the slide, put arrows in the right places, combine shapes to make a fast schematic etc, this just doesn’t cut. Sure, technically, it’s possible to do it with mermaid, etc, but it takes exponentially more time.

Native math support i think is the main hurdle when it comes to libreoffice for me. Some of the plug-ins that add this functionality were also causing the app to crash.

Sorry yes, i meant onlyoffice. Like i said, it’s indeed quite similar to power point, except for the weirdly looking video embedding. (And of course the fact that it’s free, although i’ve never paid for the powerpoint either :) )

well... it kind of works offline. all the media (at least he videos) are still kept on the cloud. with latex -- there are literally free online latex services like overleaf which can also sync with a github for offline use. so i'd say latex, despite its heavy install process, is kinda industry standard at this point. besides, you actually don't need the whole 8GB of latex to get started on beamer. you can probably get away with as-required installation, which essentially installs only the packages that you explicitly specify in your document. yes, configuring it might indeed be a bit of a headache at first, but with tools like latexmk etc, it's actually not too bad. and i'd be willing to spend the time to actually tailor the workflow if it had a decent-enough UI and support for videos.

At first it was the former, then the latter. )

Well in that sense Macs aren’t too different from any other laptop. HDMI worked just fine. I was also trying to connect a USB-C monitor through an HDMI adapter, which didn’t quite work, but I think that might be the case with other laptops too (it’s probably a driver issue). From the desktop experience point of view, KDE handles multi monitor flawlessly, can’t think of any complaints.