At work I do a little of everything, and one of the things on the list of “everything” is graphic design for things like advertising, flyers, t-shirts, trade-show booths, whitepaper headers, holiday cards, and anything else that needs some art.
A couple of weeks ago it was decided that we would go to a couple of trade-shows this year, which requires new marketing materials and an update to the booth design to cover the new stuff we do.
The problem with booth graphics is they are huge… 300 dpi across several feet of canvas results in pretty large files, and the web-based Photoshop replacement I’ve been using runs out of steam at anything slightly larger than A1.
Soooo, I had to re-up my Adobe subscription, and Adobe only really runs on Windows and MacOS. Add to this that my hot rod PC really only runs Linux and Windows and – welp.
Friday I backed up everything in ~/ and started the Windows install right after work; and finished getting the OS into a usable shape and everything restored / installed by about 2am.
Most of the effort was just shutting down Windows 11’s incredible desire to report everything to Microsoft. Sure, there are config switches you can turn off that tamps down the behavior – but to really gain some privacy in modern Windows you need to do registry tricks, remove applications, rename things, and lock directories to prevent the weekly update from just turning it all back on…
In the end though I got Windows to behave, and I spent the weekend working on art projects for work and some new textures for my Secondlife avatar.
I also installed a couple of video games that didn’t run well in Linux and goofed off a bit. Granted, things like Proton and WINE have come a really long ways towards making gaming on Linux a reality, they’re still only about 90% of the way there… Give it another year, maybe two, and there won’t be any appreciable difference between Linux and Windows as far as games go.
Really, if it wasn’t for work wanting me to do art and Adobe’s steadfast refusal to support Linux, I’d be perfectly happy with modern Linux… But that day isn’t today unfortunately, and for a while at least I’ll be wrestling with Windows.
Listening to "Legends Never Die" by Against The Current