 Here is my new GNU/Linux distribution guide about Debian KDE 12, the right GNU/Linux distribution for professional digital painting in 2024! Also about three major problems with GNU/Linux distros that will drive away all professional artists, IMO, and how I got kicked out of the Fedora KDE ecosystem with F40, which imposed Plasma6 and Wayland. I hope it helps other artists here! Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-2024-install-guide 90 comments
 @davidrevoy Please note I am not trying to start an argument, just trying to understand your point. Also note that I am not a Fedora user, but I am a very long time KDE user. @nikatjef Hey, no problem. Check the discussion linked on the "2. The challenges and the issues" and you'll have all the background. @davidrevoy Thank you for the post, sadly I can't help with any of the points you raise as I have very little experience with anything you mention. :( @nikatjef Thank you very much for reading. True, difficult problems and very challenging.   @davidrevoy https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/python-is-python3 Checked out this package? :P @triskelion lol, very cool! But also totally hard (impossible?) to discover for a newcomer. I'll update it on the article, thank you!  @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org great write up! Also the distribution I chose recently.  @davidrevoy Just a small clarification but the old Wacom tablet config module is still maintained and released as part of Plasma 6. It's X11 only but this is also something upstream Plasma still support. https://invent.kde.org/plasma/wacomtablet/ And yeah I am also not a fan that Fedora dropping X11, there was no need for that yet. Changing the default to Wayland and keeping X11 available for people like you, would have been enough. @carlschwan Thank you very much for the feedback and clarifications. Very good to know it's possible to get a Plasma6 X11 setup with the previous tablet config module. That should include maybe a Neon KDE Stable among my list of possible good distro for painting. @davidrevoy @raghukamath @carlschwan @davidrevoy I heard from an acquaintance who works for RedHat that the desktop team basically exists so they can keep the Hollywood content creation crowd -- the people using Houdini and so on. But I guess the memo hasn't arrived; also, most VFX studios were still using KDE3 in 2019, the last time we talked. @halla @raghukamath @carlschwan @davidrevoy > also, most VFX studios were still using KDE3 in 2019, the last time we talked. On another side, VFX studios probably have the ability to raise enough funds to help KDE & Wayland developpers to improve things... :ablobcatcoffee: @grum999 @raghukamath @carlschwan @davidrevoy Actually, they go broke all the time. Their employees migrate from company tax have to tax haven. There's not a cent to be wrung out of the big VFX companies.  I wonder if Debian with KDE and X11 would also work better for blind users. Wayland has apparently also broken the linux screen reader.  As a(n albeit sighted) daily user of Debian + KDE + X11, outside of my lack of real experience with things like Orca, it's a solid experience in all other ways. I try Wayland once in a while, but there are too many mouse and gaming issues for me to switch to it totally still. @alienghic @davidrevoy Screen readers work well in Wayland, there are only minor issues, some of them are at least in #GNOME right now worked on to be fixed. So what is the screen reader status with gnome & wayland? I've seen complaining about fedora. I've only slightly figured out how to use Orca. It seems like gnome-terminal and files works well. But other things I use like evolution or dino were pretty useless. @davidrevoy I really wish we could make building Krita easier... For the Qt6 port, I'm actually using only distribution packages to see how far I can get. But working with the upstread Qt project can be really hard, and we need sooooo many patches to make Qt work well on all four platforms we support! @halla :blobcatheart: Hey, take the time you need for the Qt6 port, I now have a home to run Krita as it is until 2028. I remember the old ports in the past (Qt3 to Qt4, etc) and how they are massive work. Take care! @davidrevoy Yeah, and this time... Apparently there was nobody left who remembers the days when Qt was supposed to make C++ as accessible to non-computer scientists as Java, and it's gotten seriously c-plus-plussified.  @davidrevoy this mainly based on this forum reply, that is also a couple years old now: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1794599#p1794599 but also, nothing much more recent is coming up on that xsane-in-wayland issue, so…  @eliasp @davidrevoy no, i haven’t – but thanks for the heads-up! i take it they’re usable outside of KDE itself? @gekitsu oh, sorry - just realized only Skanpage is available via Flatpak.  @davidrevoy (extra space in the markdown link to “my previous installation guide” in the color calibration section. The audacious and videotrimmer links in the software section is broken too) @oblomov Thank you for the proofreading feedback 💜 (and sorry for them, I spent two weeks on this article 🙃 I'm now blind to the big mistakes) I'll update the article now. @davidrevoy no, thank you for spending the time writing all these things down, it's extremely precious information.  @davidrevoy in the section 6B you have two typos and the links to audacious and scribus weren’t rendered correctly  @davidrevoy excellent overview 👍Have you ever tried or considered opensuse? (Not trying to convince you to use it, just curious if you'd ever tried that) @ivor Hey, yes, I was an OpenSuse user at one point (but maybe long ago), I always loved the extra admin tools they offer in the Settings to help the user to do advanced administration task with a GUI. I went to their website when I tested the guide for this distro, but I had difficulties to understand how Leap was 'frozen' and how long they would go Plasma5, or if they already ship Plasma 6, etc. This confusion in the communication of their website made me not testing it this time.  @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org Plasma 6 is available on Tumbleweed. @ivor@social.ivor.org @davidrevoy yeah agreed, their stable releases appeared confusing to me, and they're doing it again with the new 'slowroll' changes. ☹️ So as a developer I just go with Tumbleweed which I find ok as long as I decide how and when I update otherwise it can be a bit chaotic.  @davidrevoy boosting not as an artist ahaha but as a linux nerd it's good to know what distros are doing  @davidrevoy was expecting ranty, instead got detailed, well reasoned, opinionated setup info. Unfortunately I can't draw a stick figure, so.... :-)   @davidrevoy This guide is awesome! And not only for digital artists. Many tips are valuable for ordinary mortals too. @davidrevoy You may want to give a try to xournal++ (https://xournalpp.github.io/). Better UI, nice features and less bugs than in xournal. @jljouannic 😍 😍 😍 Oh, good to see a fork with more polishing and features. Thank you for the link!  @davidrevoy Reading this reminds me of all the problems I ran into when setting up my new desktop a bit less than a year ago. I'm really lucky with having always used debian. Plasma is new for me and give me headaches but all the critical stuff works so it's good. I wish I didn't need to turn my tablet on and off after boot to have the pen activated.. kinda stupid little bug. I wish there was some creative linux fund to have some devs work on our problems if we just gave them some money. @davidrevoy @davidrevoy Also thank you so much for writing this, now I have something to link to people when they ask about this stuff. I had forgotten all the details at this point.  @davidrevoy cool, will be reading this post after work, I'll see if you sell me on it :)  @davidrevoy Interesting read. I'm not a digital artist, but my photo editing rig is on #Debian +X11 for many of the reasons you mentioned. One of the reasons I've stayed on Debian for the last 15 years is that, due to its slow pace and overall conservatism, all of the "next big things" in Linux tend to be more feature complete and less buggy by the time they hit Debian stable. @davidrevoy This is a great blog post. Debian stable is a nice base platform for years. Backports and flatpaks keep the user facing apps up to date. Enjoy your setup. @nielso I wish the community would get an initiative across various projects up and running where they pick a random user's special use-case (like yours) and try to fix as many of the issues there are as possible and by solving those, raise the tide for all other users in a similar place as well. @miskatonicstudio He sleeps next to me, I took my camera to capture his reaction to the "pspsps" → he merely opened the eyes and fell asleep immediately after 😆 @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org @miskatonicstudio@mastodon.social He's probably used to such compliments.   I just installed AV Linux this month. So far, I like it a lot. I was using Ubuntu Studio, but got fed up with the snap packages. AV is built on MX which is built on Debian. The desktop environment is XFCE4, so it looks a lot like Ubuntu Studio. Also, it's an init.d system by default, although there is an alternate systemd boot provided. Haven't tried my colorimeter yet. @TerryHancock Thank you for the feedback. First time I hear about AV Linux, but for this article I tested MX Linux KDE (and it was super high on my list). https://www.bandshed.net/2024/01/14/av-linux-23-1-enlightened-released/ , very cool. 👍  @davidrevoy Debian is one of my favourite distros, my home was Fedora, I have been trying Debian in a VM and on WSL, much better and more stable than Fedora. I haven’t tried F40 yet but I may not do that. @davidrevoy Thank you for this most excellent post. The deprecation or disappearance of CLI interfaces is a thumb in the nose to all experienced users, who can now only use a program in the way the creator thought to use it, and sometimes only with a file structure that the creator had in mind. I do not use my system the way you do, but thanks for pointers to three programs I did not know about but will be very useful to me. I remember an awful lot of posts happening around the time the decision was made to default to the Wayland protocol for the f40 KDE spin. I sure came away from those discussions understanding that, while Wayland would be the default, it would remain possible to install X11 and continue along as before with it, too. I was pretty sure that they hadn't banned it, just discontinued making it the default. Are you saying that that's not true? @jrredho "the transition to KDE Plasma 6 will also include dropping support for the X11 session entirely, leaving only Plasma Wayland as the sole offered desktop mode. " sources: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/release-notes/desktop/ (but it's released, so you can also read many reviews and videos about F40 KDE and test it in a VM).  @davidrevoy Just mere curiosity: Does KDE Plasma 6 on X11 (so not Fedora) also have a regressed tablet configuration?
As it seems kind of weird that KDE would ship a new release with such a significant regression. @davidrevoy My graphics tablet wasn't configurable out of the box on #Wayland as well, but it was relatively easy to create a config file that made it appear in #GNOME settings. Though I am not sure if there are all the configurations you would need (my tablet is pretty simple though). @davidrevoy If #Krita had enough sponsors, I am sure they could pay someone to speed up the feature-complete port to plasma6/#wayland. Don't you think you could use your reach to organise a special fundraising project to fix said issues?  @davidrevoy : Merci David, ce genre de post est essentiel. Et tu pointes bien les problèmes de Wayland que les geeks en console comme moi ne voient pas (je ne sais même pas ce que c’est la calibration d’un écran). Au fait, bienvenue sous Debian !   @davidrevoy loved this article. I also installed #debian12 with #gnome but I may switch after reading! |
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@davidrevoy I like your orange triangle.