I am only a few days into using exclusivly Linux and generally I feel its going ok. There are only a few things that irritate me but none of them as such are deal breakers
1: Not being able to see thumbnails in the ‘open file’ / ‘save as’ picker
2: Getting used to Gimp instead of photoshop
3: Mounting internal drives manually
4: The sound feels muffled and weak compared to same hardware on windows
5: I have not been brave enough to attempt printing yet
1: There’s a preference under settings for that.
2: Fair, practice more.
3: There’s a setting to automount internal drives at boot.
4: Are you running a USB live OS, some of those kernels might have issues with certain hardware. Otherwise, there’s a setting where you can choose the sound processing pathway and boost the signal if necessary.
5: You plug a printer, click print, then paper goes out. It’s trivially easy on Linux to print anything as long as it is USB, wireless printers are a bit finicky but overall just as functional.
Diagnosis: skill issue.
1: are you sure? I seem to be able to set the view to thumbnails for the file explorer, but not when opening/saving files. From what I gather, and based on some (very) superficial research, each program chooses what file picker they use. Most have the one that when you select a file, they will show a preview of that file on the right. But not the option to show all files as large rhumbnails
2: my greatest annoyance at the moment, is that I can’t seem to be able to freely rotate the crop tool, in order to resize AND crop the image in one go, as I used to do on Photoshop. This one feature has kept from moving to Gimp even when I was on Windows. I see an option to crop in the rotation tool, but still can’t seem to quite figure it out
3: yes, I have found this, and actually find it pretty handy! Just a thing that is done different than windows really. Nothing that is irritating. Actually its practical, if you have large drives that you mainly use for storage
4: This is just one thing that more or less worked out of the box on windows, but now is either distorted because I have too much volume going to it, or muffled because the volume is too low. Again, its not a thing that is ruining the experience. It’s probably down to having more options than just the one that works on windows
5: One day, I will be brave enough. That said, I don’t print much these days. I have found out that I probably use my 3D printer more than I use my paper printer!
Indeed I just need more practice and skill but I kind of enjoy having a clean Linux install instead of a dual boot. It forces you to figure things out. Previously, I’d just switch over to windows and do things the way I used to. Now I need to spend some time figuring things out
Network printers are supported just as well. The only thing finicky about Wi-Fi printers specifically is the Wi-Fi, and your OS ain’t gonna affect that.