I have a Huawei Matebook D15 and it's using Everest driver for audio. Unfortunately, until now there is no working driver for my laptop and I really wanted to switch to Linux.
Okular: You can create a custom 'stamp' in the settings and use an image of your signature. This is utterly hidden and the devs know about this, this will get better soonish.
Pro tip. Although it's not made for that, Inkscape 1.2 is actually the best tool I found for editing PDFs on Linux. The latest 1.2 version allows you to open the PDF files, rearrange pages, add or move elements, and best of all, edit any text that's already in the PDF. And it doesn't break the layout at all. Once you open the file, you just need to ungroup all the elements by pressing ctrl+shift +g a couple of times. It's a life saver, and haven't found anything better, even after trying many other alternatives, including the ones mentioned in this video.
Will it allow you to digitally sign a PDF? Will it enable you to read a Military ID card (CAC) and digitally sign? This is a MAJOR issue; and could conceivable prevent me from going to Linux.
Parental control sadly goes against much of "core user" Linux mentality - having full access to your system and being able to change anything if you just want to enough. This means that the systems are built in a way to allow that, so retrofitting parental control sounds like a nightmare
@@jan-lukas i dont know, it should be pretty easy to use PAM to only allow members of certain groups to access certain applications, and to set a limit on how long a session can be open for each day. To then have this managed via LDAP would be ideal. Things would just be easier if we treated children like untrusted applications, which lets be honest, they are.
@@jan-lukas Considering the owner of the system is the parent and the parent wants control, he/she should be given that. It's no difference to a business owner's policies for securing a work computer, really!
Agreed 100%, and not having good parental controls on Linux beyond restricting root/super user access on a separate user account is why I ended up giving my stepdaughter an Walmart ONN Android GO tablet, and a Bluetooth keyboard, and making a kids account so I have control over what apps go onto it with some remote monitoring, same with her Alcatel Android GO Edition phone.
Okular offering a 'digital signature' option literally means a cryptographic signature. Why this, a feature probably used by less than 1% of users, was a priority over an actual drawn signature is beyond me.
Because in the real world the drawn signature has 0 value. If you really want to use it, just put a png. You can't use it as an official document without a real signature.
TBF - digital signatures that are crypto based is one of the things that was actually stopping me from using linux full time... There are millions of people who actually use this feature. I have no use for signing something digitally though with a drawn signature, that has 0 legal use... there is no non-repudiation at all.
I always felt that Linux was for power users first, developers second, and maybe depending on the app the DE the weather the time of day and the users diet, regular users
A-a usable Linux setup?! At this time of day, at this time of year, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your office?!... May I see it?
Totally agree 👍 I was using arch Linux but i found that I need to learn some programming languages as I wanna be a developer so I got back to windows 10, but I'm sure that one day I will switch to Linux cause I like it.
you're right, a digital or electronic signature is by definition a cryptographic signature. Putting an image of a drawn signature into an electronic document is not signing it. This is something a lot of people struggle with to understand.
@@onehaxxor8574 I think it's not that people don't understand this, but more like the mechanism of setting up and applying a digital signature in such a way that it can be globally verified is basically impossible from what I can tell. So you might as well just stamp it with a scan of your signature
How would an image of your handwriting ensure anything though, you can easily modify the contents of the file, or copy that signature and paste it onto some other pdf file. I sorta get the uses for digital signatures, but these days emails and chat apps are protected by a very similar signature technology (DKIM/SSL), so it's really easy to verify the source of the file.
@@Yutaro-Yoshii it doesn't ensure anything. Much like how a real signature can also be forged. In the end you just want to get things done and that's just the way it is. I doubt it'll be changed until there's is a very easy way for people to do digital signatures, perhaps using an official national ID or something like that
Out of all the email clients, I actually prefer Thunderbird. I've been using it even when I was on Windows. So moving over to Linux, it works well for me. They have updated the interface over the last 6 months or so. What I really like about it is it's so easy to organise emails via dates and topic. Then when it's time to archive, they're already in their own years. Or simply close it and it's pretty much hidden. One other great thing about it is if your distro ever breaks, it's relatively easy to just copy the directory contents straight over the newly installed app and you'll have all your emails and settings as they were before.
You kinda have to pick between good reader and terrible editor and decent editor but terrible reader. Xournal refusing to let me select text or mark text directly is so annoying. Its by far the worst thing about Linux PDS. If it had that one feature, it would be the best PDF editor ever.
Put your primary monitor to the right of your secondary in KDE, then try and summon the context menu (right click on something). This bug has been around for more than a decade: KDE blames QT, and QT blames KDE.
Parental control would sure be a nice thing, but I think that the amount of potential users is so low that it's not worth it at all. Plus we all know that the FOSS community won't agree to one base line standard but create like 30 different standards which do the exact same thing but work different and require extra development time.
The default pdf editor/viewer (Preview) and the default Mail app on macOS are really some of the most underrated parts of that operating system. It was only when I built my Linux workstation that I realized how much I used those and even Windows has garbage alternatives.
@@ettoreatalan8303 Not sure - i've never had any 3d content in any of the pdfs I have seen. Most PDF work I do is signing documents or annotating them and it works great for those things.
You had the same experience with signing the PDF that LTT had. Basically, there's putting your signature on the bottom, and then there's cryptographically signing it. You both were trying to do with the latter, which is why it was so much harder. So technically, it was actually doing it properly.
@@TheLinuxEXP Your hand writing is different then by signing it on the PC. I print the form, sign it and scan it from my phone to do the PC. I think OnlyOffice has form filler where you could fill in. You could even make entire PDF from scratch.
@@claudiojaramillo5177 They wont bother even trying to do it on linux because it's such a pain in the ass. There are millions of people in the US alone that use that feature.. literally every government contractor, military member, and government employee use it... If we want to see linux get a major foothold on the desktop, then people need to start seeing it at work. yeah, there are millions of people who don't need it, but there is also 1.4 million service members who do use it, and thousands of federal contractors. Get the government using it on the desktops, and you'll see a shift in user base at home. It's a feature that has a larger demand than people think...
Signing PDFs is a feature I didn't know you even needed. In Sweden we have digital identities provided by our banks. All digital signing happens through this signing process. It feels weird that you slapp an image on top of a PDF and somehow that image is binding that digital document to you? It must be extremely easy to falsify documents like those. :) In case of our signing process, the bank functions like a trust, where they have validated the digital identity with the real life person. And the system is de-centralized. My biggest gripe with Linux is the lack of new features. Like HDR and fractional scaling, or latest GPU software features. Generally you are several years behind everyone else. I have always found Linux to be best suited for older hardware. Meanwhile those always wanting to be on the bleeding edge suffer in Linux. Other than that, I would like better UI consistency. But due to how open the desktop environment is, I understand why it's extremely hard to get a consistent user experience.
My biggest gripe is a standard thing on Windows: proper GUI control panel for the GPU. Nvidia kinda has one, but AMD and Intel are lacking it and it is really needed for properly tuning your GPU.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 good so you can shut up and enjoy your garbage pc and stop blaming windows which it seems you haven't even tried out custom linux installations... wtf how many times do you need to install it? does it break each month? :O
Great job compiling this list. This is by far the most practical list I’ve come across. I keep windows on every computer as a backup for PDF editing - luckily I don’t have to do much of that these days. And you’re so right with mail apps. I’ve been jumping from thunderbird, evolution, neomutt and now currently using Geary which has its own issues.
@@yamaddie I have heard about mainspring. I guess I should give it a try. I moved away from gmail for the most part. Do my own email hosting. Feels better to have more control but PIB for setting it up.
i just use my phone....oneplus5t android does it seamlessly via any of dozens/hundreds of apps........ why we gotta hunt for just 1 or split it over multiple? why are we YEARS behind when we all know full well devs have phones too
Wow, I didn’t even know that you can fill in something in PDF. I thought this format was only for viewing. This is probably due to the fact that this way of working with documents is not very common in my region. I'm glad I grew up in a time when there were no parental controls. I learned to consciously find content that really suits me, as well as independently repair the system after my actions. It taught me responsibility.
That was the original intent, then adobe bloated it (or is their viewer/optional pay for bits) adding a pile of extras I'm not interested in, but are forced to take on just to be up to date software wise.
Vidéo editing is also pretty lacking in my opinion. Really the most accomplished editor is DaVinci Resolve but it doesn't even have h264 support on it's free tier. Kdenlive, shotcut or olive are really just good for small a light effects
In fairness, the video editors everyone uses on Windows are paid, so complaining that the free tier of one on Linux is useless is kind of silly. If you need to do some heavy editing work, you pay for it, regardless of the platform.
I use KDE, and naturally I use Kmail for the integration. And you're absolutely right, it can be overwhelming to set up. But I think one of the joys of using KDE is the tinkering and configuring it. I recently set up a Gmail account in it, and there is a guided set up that made it easy, but it's not obvious where it is. I also connected a proton mail account using proton mail bridge. Both just work perfectly, and honestly I hope it never becomes less feature rich even if that means it stays complicated. It could use more/better tutorials though. Maybe I should make some.
my current struggle with Kmail is it's soo bare bones in displaying html email which I get all the time which is why I ended up on mailspring. it doesn't entirely match my DE but it works well for what I need for calendar I just use Teams since I have to have it for work any ways. having said that blue mail is pretty decent for calendar but it's a mess for email and I just abbandoned contacts I just add them from my phone and sync them with my Computer
Aside from nerds, I don't know anyone who enjoys tinkering and configuring applications. The application should just work as expected, and the average user is fine. A love affair with IT will never happen for most average users anyway.
I usually use Inkscape for doing stuff with PDFs. It's meant to do things with SVGs, but it does the job reasonably well. Still a bit of a pain though lol. I've had very few issues in terms of displays, well except XFCE struggles to accept more than one display without getting the display profile set up, but it's pretty easy to fix.
I really felt the real talk about the PDF viewers. There are many tech reviewers out there who are like "You can do everything with Linux". When I opened the first time Okular, I traveled back to 2005 concerning design and features. If you ever worked with Adobe Acrobat Pro you know what I mean.
Regarding Signing PDF, I use Microsoft Edge which somehow have a great integrated PDF engine that allows ink signing and form filling which will STICK to the file itself. It do not support Digital Signing (with Cerificate). But yea.... its Microsoft....
@@paulg3336 Firefox is a worse Browser and pdf is worse. Give IT to Microsoft where they deserve it. Edge and vscode are great, Windows is overal the best os. Tracking sucks..
Something like Protonmail or similar solves the problem quite easily. I never understood the need to download emails to my computer or having a mail client installed. And yes, the pdf problem is quite annoying.
20+ year Linux user here, and I agree 100% about the disaster that it interacting with PDFs. Here's how I get by: 1) Master PDF Editor, as others mentioned. There's an older version that lets you save edits without a watermark if you search a bit. 2) PDFstudioViewer by Qoppa software. It's basically a Java clone of the old Adobe Reader that used to be available for Linux. And finally, PDF XChange Editor by Tracker Software (terrible company name), it's a Windows program that runs perfectly under Wine.
@@matthewb4399 I don't understand exactly what you are asking for. Anyway, I don't use advanced pdf editing, if that your case. Cheers and Merry Christmas.
My biggest problem with linux is that there is no option to adjust trackpad 2 finger scrolling speed. The default speed is way too fast it flies way past what I need
For E-Mail I use Mailspring (on KDE and Gnome), while it usually takes a little to start up, it's a really solid program. Although it doesn't really look 'native', it certainly doesn't look bad. It's very legible and easy to setup, has features like combined inbox, delayed mail send, signatures, mail rules, templates and all the basics you would want. It also allows for some basic customization
For PDFs I use Xournal++ which lets me put images (my signature) and text wherever I want. Open source and is also available on Windows if you multiboot
I work at a university. All the people I work with use either Windows or Apple. 95% of them use web apps for mails and calendars, the rest uses Thunderbird like me and that is all we ever wanted. One reason I was happy to change to linux was PDF handling, in contrast to that horrible adobe brick you have to use on windows and if you just want to look in a different way at a pdf, you already need the pro suite, or so it seems like. I am glad that the third party solutions are not as sketchy as on windows. Display stuff... does display things for a normal 1080p monitor. I don't know anyone personally who uses a monitor with a higher resolution and we certainly don't have any of those at work. Dual monitors with different resolutions can be tricky sometimes, yes. Autom-what? Never felt the need for that and don't know anyone at university that does. I never saw parental control stuff on windows, I have only seen that first on a linux distro. I mean, I can see why some of those things can be slightly annoying to a few, but with none of the points mentioned here I have any actual issues. And I don't know any Windows or Apple user who would have a problem with those things when changing to linux. So I can only assume that those things are only issues for certain people and/or for specific tasks one has or wants to do with a computer. And that "wants to" is actually a thing to consider. Since the time Apple became "cool" and Android started and Windows went along a bit with it, these companies seem to force a certain way how to use a computer and I never followed that. So I have no issue when linux distros do not provide those things. To the contrary, I am happy those things are not forced on me. So to me, linux not having features that Apple and Windows provide is a pro, cause to me those features are bugs sold as features.
Atril PDF viewer (the default viewer for MATE) has no issue with PDF input forms; which is weird, since it's basically a fork of the GNOME viewer. For digital signing, you can use poppler, which has a digital signature tool in its poppler-utils package. And for actual editing (and all of the above as well), my go to choice is Master PDF editor. Even in its free edition, it offers a lot more than Adobe professional ever did. In other words, good solutions exist (at least for this issue), they just haven't been adopted by the "fancy" desktop environments yet. But, in my opinion, these are minor; first, we have more serious problems to solve. Like, I don't know, upgrading your distribution WITHOUT breaking half the user's installation!!!!
That is 3(!) solutions for 1(!) problem. No wonder, people drift towards Apple's walled garden and their apps. And I am working with all 3 major OS these days.
Linux has a special place in my heart, but this and many other reasons are why I'm starting to see the world like Chris Titus; treating OSes almost like apps, whether through emulation or additional hardware. I think you need to be more mercenary in your choices, no matter how great you think Linux is.
If there are more people like you complaining about how doing basic stuff in Linux is so hard that you can easily do in other operating systems. Then Linux community would have fixed this kind of issues making Linux number one operating system in the world.
It's weird to say this but for drawing on PDF, I downloaded Microsoft Edge as their PDF drawing is pretty good (I don't know if you can arrange PDFs though)
I remember asking about parental controls in Linux. Everyone told me to be a better parent rather than restrict things on the computer. It really made me angry at the community.
@@TheRikkieh buddy, the fact that an 8 year old is going to grow up and watch porn when they’re older doesn’t mean they should be exposed to people having sex while they’re still 8. More importantly, young kids would probably download more malware than a grandma would, and parents need to be able to control that, especially since kids generally use their parents computer. Also, if you think parents have the time or energy to watch their kids like a hawk 24/7, you’re out of your mind
What's the difference between using parental control software and the sysadmin at your work giving you a restricted account that won't let you install software and keeps you out of most of the file system? Sounds like they're basically the same thing to me.
Sometimes it's hard to handle the truth and I understand that. I highly encourage you to go with better parenting (educating your kid, preparing for encounters of different types of materials, etc) rather than restricting things on the computer. When you're a parent, you're responsible, please remember that. I wish you and your children good luck and prosperity.
I use GIMP to edit PDFs. Pages become layers (enables the addition and deletion of pages), alignment tool can be used to ensure any edits are neat and organized, signature can be pasted or drawn. I just save the project as a PDF again once I'm finished. That said, there really should be a more accessible option for doing these types of edits included with most distributions. Most people have to work with PDFs at one point or another, so lacking such a feature or application could be a big turn off for many newcomers.
That HDR support is one of the things, that is stopping me from using linux. Others would be worse options with major streaming companies, worse gaming options and general software/hardware support, worse stability than Windows (your experience might vary of course). Dont get me wrong, there are advantages as well of course. Some of the DEs are beautiful (Zorins Gnome spin, Cinnamon Manjaro...), you can adjust them way more, you have more security/privacy etc. It is just that linux is still far from being that great to average people, who watch streams TVs, play games, sometimes work (MS office). I have never met that "grandma who just uses browser". If she is not just a legend than yeah, linux might be great for her. And for all the tech-savvy people who spend most of the time in terminal. If you want to do more than browse the internet and you dont want to go outside of GUI (ie use terminal), than there is still a long way to go for linux. And I hope for it to be succesful!
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Concerning PDF: my workflow as a researcher involves a ton of PDF highlighting, adding notes etc. Even though the stock apps (Evince, Okular) support it, the UX has never been that great. But recently, Zotero added a PDF reader/annotator, and that one is genuinely great, highly recommended! It's not a full-featured PDF solution, so it wouldn't probably help with all the tasks mentioned in the video, but that's also an advantage, as it can afford to optimize the UX for the note-taking workflow. Also, I think it's worth mentioning that while I very much like the UI of Preview on macOS (mostly -- sometimes the ToC disappears and it's non-obvious how to make it come back; search is wonky; dark mode was unreadable in places upon rollout), it has let me down multiple times over the years as far as data integrity goes. Disappearing or corrupted annotations, irrecoverably corrupted OCRed text under scanned page image, I'm sure I'm forgetting some.
Yes PDF editing is a pain on Linux, you can also use Inkscape to edit them, but I decided to buy a license for Master PDF. With that, I can do everything needed to edit the PDFs. I also bought VueScan for my document scanner and Turpoprint for the printer because they didn't work 100% on Linux either.
@@liudas5377 Hello The reason why I bought software is quite simple, the existing open source software partly does not support my hardware anymore, like for example my document scanner. The backend SANE, which most scanning software on Linux needs, has a bug for my scanner that has not been fixed for ages and is therefore unusable for me. With Turobrint I have additionally supports the CMYK color model, I can add my own ICC color spaces and even produce color-consistent proof prints of CMYK documents. And the PDF stuff has already been explained in the video
To be fair, in okular is easy to annotate a pdf. You just need to activate the annotation mode which is in the top menu under "tools" (idk if it's called that way in english, as I have my system in italian). Also, the shortcut to enable or disable annotation mode is F6. Once activated, you can basically do anything from the bar that appears on the top, I use this a lot, I just wish for it to support the pen pressure of my graphics tablet, but I know that this is some niche use case
I'm actually dreading the Thunderbird UI update, it works fine as it is for me. The last thing I want is everything to get bigger (which seems to be the rule for modern UIs, just make everything harder to do by wasting space) and make seeing if anything has been filtered into my many folders much harder. I have no need for my e-mail across multiple devices though. I also prefer to avoid DPI scaling, instead I zoom only where I need it so as to maximise my screen space. Still, as long as any changes are optional instead of forcing me to become less efficient, then I understand that some things do need improving.
Some pet peeves of mine that seem to persist for quite a while. 1. A good two-panel file manager like Total Commander. Krusader is close, but no cigar (yet) and others don't even come close. MC is close in look and feel to what my habits come from, but it's not a GUI app. 2. Handling keyboard layouts. Linux installers often don't let you configure more than one layout at installation time, so if you've chosen Russian as your kbd language and your password was in English, you won't have an option to switch the layout after you first boot into the freshly installed OS. Which means you've locked yourself out of it. Configuring layouts and switching shortcuts is a pain in any DE. Lockscreen language seems to match whatever language you have in the app that is currently active, whereas in Windows it's always your default layout, On top of that, some Linux installations seem to handle modifier keys based on the time you press them. So if you have Ctrl+Shift configured as your layout switching shortcut, and try selecting one word to the left of your cursor (Ctrl+Shift+Left arrow), you'll just move 1 character to the left and switch your layout. Windows handles it no problem. I'm sure this can all be configured somewhere, but it is quite a hassle.
I'm sorry, but webmail is superior for like 90% of society. The reason why there are no good desktop apps is that nobody feels the need for them. Having an email client that you can open from any device, anywhere, without needing to install anything, without needing to wait for any synchronization, just log in and use is a no-brainer for most people.
that's not true. mail apps serve a great purpose specially with notifying and allowing you to view and reply to emails right there and then. Much quicker than opening a browser. Same thing could be said about using google calendar vs an app. It's important and it doesn't suck because there's a lack of need for it. It sucks because the people that linux caters to don't require or care for those programs and features. Developers catering to developers is a big issue in the linux world. So is finding someone capable and willing to design a decent looking and functioning gui app. Gnome photos crashes on start for me on a fresh install of fedora. You have to install the flatpak verison for it to even work and fails out the box. It might not fail for you but you know it's an unstable app. There aren't any photos viewing apps on linux distros which support well implemented trackpad gestures. They either partially support or support in the worst way (unintuitive and unnecessary gestures with poor accuracy and high failure rates). I can't find a video player on linux which allows me to zoom on a video clip while playing the video. Unless you count vlc's implementation as a genuine feature. Trackpad support doesn't exist for those apps either. Can't seek forward and backward or if you can, it's all over the place. There's no accuracy. I guess trackpad's are useless too and trackpad gestures are unnecessary and not required for most people? Then there's poor battery and power management implementation. I suppose laptops don't matter either. You can see the clear pattern and prioritisation of features that developers find useful as opposed to creating well rounded solutions. I'm sure you can find software which counters the arguments I've made in this comment but try to find one which contains all the requirements of a general user even at a low standard. Most linux apps aren't minimal. They're undeveloped and empty.
It seems that I've missed some memo. Can someone please explain what the purpose of pictures of signatures is? I get what a cryptographic signature would do, but a picture of my signature? Does it prove anything if someone could just copy it and paste it somewhere else?
am i only one that is 99% satisfied with Thunderbird for home use? much better than web clients, yes you need to tweak a bit for yourself but all in all it is quite good experience
There is, aside from the ones you mentioned, one other point for me: having a proper GUI for hardware control. I really hate having to dick around in config files to do stuff like monitor setup, gpu config and tuning, fanspeed control, etc, if it is even possible. I mean, there are some applications for that but as far as I am concerned they all lack features and/or stability. Fan control for example: it shows seven fan headers without explaining which is which and it randomly loses config or misses one header on boot. Or corectrl. Great little GUI to control some aspects of your gpu/cpu but when compared to AMD software it is missing a lot of features.
It's for reasons like these that I just use Google Workspace. All of my stuff is directly or indirectly linked to those apps, and they work together well. On the other hand, even now, with so many developments, linux still feels like something a power user would use. For example, I wanted to password-protect a folder. How do I do that on my Fedora? I had to go through a learning session just to do that. How nice would it be if there was an option to do that in the "properties" of all directories? Or perhaps a special "secure folder" folder specially for password-protecting files? (This function is available in Google Files mobile app.) I hate to nag like this, since linux is made through contributions, but I don't have the ability to contribute yet.
Thunderbird has been my preferred email client since it first split off from Seamonkey. So around 20 years at this point and long before I was running Linux full time. If you don't like the layout just change it. Pretty much everything that shows up can be turned on or off and everything can be rearranged and you can load themes to further change the look.
For me biggest pain is lack of office suite that would do the job for me. None of them can handle MS Office formats properly. Vast majority of documents if they are not pdf, they are doc or docx etc. Only office does it pretty well, but it lacked in terms of features last time i checked, and Libre Office is opposite - fully featured, but cant handle ms formats properly.
The OnlyOffice developers are doing their best to implement missing features. However, you have to tell the OnlyOffice support which missing features you need.
Your critic about fractional scaling only applies to Gnome and Plasma (just on Wayland with Plasma) since the Wayland architecture resembled the macOS idea to downscale integer resolutions down to fractional resolutions (a mess). Fractional scaling works with Plasma on Xorg (set a custom font DPI + a custom icon size; alternatively the global scaler but this has some other problems). Just recently, Wayland fractional scaling spec was released after years of discussion. We will see true fractional scaling coming to Wayland in the next year.
2:52 The reason for that is simple. Most Linux devs are on the PDF is only for printing side. Most technical people really hate closed document formats, so if you really want to make a sheet like this, they would tell you to use odt for that.
@@TheLinuxEXP That's their point. "PDFs are not for that. You should push odt on them and force everyone to use it." This is the mentality of the "suckless" devs. They even refuse to use PDF for printing, and just uses Post Script.
@@talkysassis which is kinda ironic, since it was supposed to be THE portable document format. A format to surpass the others when a document was shared, not to be edited except for forms and fields.
the scaling thing got merged into wayland and hdr is that stage of development where they are testing it (there is an issue/merge request for gamescope but you need custom kernel)
MasterPDF is pretty good at dropping in initials or signatures. Best I’ve found on Linux so far, but paid. A must for work, so worth it for me. Built in support in Gnome and KDE would be amazing though.
1. Editing a PDF is a pita on any platform - simply because the format was never supposed to be editable. Just like it's grandpa Postscript, it was made to ensure that documents look the same on any device - if printed as PDF. So to make changes: Change the original document and reprint / export the PDF. Editing text in a PDF is only useful if you are a prepress company and fix some minor errors in a customers PDF, but then with apps like PitStop Pro by Enfocus. 2. Parental controls are more or less useless on any platform. Either buggy as hell or just unusable. Simple solution: Kids should be supervised anyway when interacting with the bad Internet. Also, DNS filters like OpenDNS work quite well (for young kids). 3. What I really miss is a good replacement for Apple's desktop indexing engine Spotlight.
In Romania we have to sign fiscal documents with a qualified digital signature (I used an USB token, so not a drawing) and our government is behind others as there is no special app, we sign directly in a pdf field. Sometimes we also upload documents in the pdf forms, which does not work either on linux. For these I used the Windows that came with the laptop, the free Acrobat Reader can do them all. For adding a visual signature sometimes I use LibreOffice as it does work well on some pdf files, when it scrues the design (I think it is mostly related to font replacements as they don't fit the page), I use Inkscape for editing the last page needing the signature amd mix them again. For mixing, extracting pages, alternate mixing (when you scan longer documents written on both sides), rotating etc. I use PDF sam, a paid version.
The pain points you mentioned here, and many others as well, can be boiled down to the lack of money. Many developers and dev teams in the Linux world are not paid, and the Linux community is still too small to be a sufficiently lucrative market. How little money floats around, I am actually amazed how far we've come.
im surprised devs care so little for their own creation they let it wallow in obscurity because they dont have time for even an ugly UI...and that they care so little for the community and linux as a whole that they allow the linux brand to maintain a reputation of CLI hell for decades on end....
@@kazzTrismus I think most devs would love to update the UI or rewrite apps to work better or be more graphical but just can't find the time (or money) to get it done. A full rewrite could take quite some time, time that you normally spend on a job to put food on the table. So as much as I'd love devs to improve their creations, I totally understand that they sometimes just can't or that it takes a long long time.
@@frankhuurman3955 highschoolers and college students are adding UI's to school projects due in weeks.... if its stuck in CLI it doesnt exist and linux CANT do the thing....its 2022 not 1992 that excuse is old and dead to the normies these days and they dont accept it
@@terrydaktyllus1320 grampy....thats why desktop linux is dead in the water... this is computing in the modern era...happily admitting linux isnt ready for the modern era of computing should be a point of shame
@@kazzTrismus oh I fully agree that Linux isn't a foolproof system ready for everyday normies to be used, it has way too many issues or missing quality of life improvements for that. Plus I'm 100% on your side that it should be possible to avoid the CLI to make it usable for everyone. But I also wanted to point out that I had loads of spare time as a high schooler + college student and not so much in the adult working life phase, so feel free to ask these high schoolers and students to work on open source software as well. Perhaps they could improve it for the normies if they have the ability to add a UI to school projects in weeks. I can do bits and pieces of development in my spare time but not pull several all-nighters to polish the UI for an open source tool I open/use 4 times in a year.
To be fair, I work in IT and a lot of our WIndows users are starting to use OWA instead of the desktop client because it's become a bloated buggy piece of crap.
I do agree with all your complaints but please (as this is the second time after LTT) search and discover the differences between digitally signing a pdf and sign it "handwritten" - it is kind of embarrassing when you complain about this working feature. From my experience - all processes around PDF Forms are more or less broken. It's a pain from the start (design a pdf form - OMG Acrobat), to fill, to save and to automatically process the PDF form. It feels completely messed up from its adobe roots. Maybe this is a reason why nobody wants to put some effort into this topic. The last time I "signed" a pdf, I imported only the page to be signed in Gimp, painted my sign, exported the page as pdf, and put the new page back in the document using pdf-arranger.
I miss being able to search the content of the applications as I can on the Mac using Spotlight. It is true that this technology is in Gnome, however developers do not have the culture of implementing this functionality.
I haven't touched linux in a few years by now but doesn't mailspring support linux? Personally I think it's a good email client app that is elegant and open source despite not providing calendars or contacts
For PDF manipulation, I use ILovePDF that has online version as well as offline app (that is just packed in browser app, but it should work offline). It can also convert from and to other formats (.jpg, .docx, ...). It can do many stuff, it has easy and clear UI. But to be honest, I don't edit PDFs that much and I believe the format is not made for to be edited.
I felt that PDF rant LMAO. Had similar issues with PDFs too. The most recent one is printing a PDF that has highlights. It gave me solid blocks of colors with the text highlighted not even visible despite the text being visible on the viewer. If I need to edit PDFs, I use Master PDF Editor 4 for PDF stuff on Linux (get the version 4 and not 5 as 5 needs a license meanwhile 4 can be used full featured with no license). They changed their terms from what I gather that's why it became like that where it suddenly needed a license when upgrading to 5. Tried LibreOffice Draw too but its a mess. Display scaling specifically fractional scaling gave me problems scaling a 1080p screen by 125% to the point that 1080p TH-cam playback lags. Turned off scaling and just adjusted the font sizes, but that made the UI of some apps not scaling like qBittorrent. Scaling is just a mess be it Windows or Linux, but sadly a worse situation under Linux (on xfce and Cinnamon anyway where I tested).
I haven't tested Master PDF Editor extensively, but it is for certain inferior to the editing features of Adobe Acrobat considering they made the PDF format.
Forgot to add this. qBittorrent not scaling in my case is a problem caused by using a GTK desktop Cinnamon for me) with Qt apps like qBittorent. In that specific case Qt 5 Settings (qt5ct) fonts setting fixed that. But in a case like the Strawberry music player the Q t6 equivalent isn't available on Mint 21.1 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) repos.
Well: Out of those things: PDF signatures: Use your jurisdiction's official specialty app for that please. They might not to be Open Source or intuitive enough to use, but they're official, and publicly recognized as that. If there isn't one; maybe there's an "officious" one out of your bank, insurance system, the military (when applicable) or elsewhere. For basic PDF manipulation: The inbuilt web browser ones or the Office suite ones should be handy enough for that. You won't normally need a specialty app to handle 5,000 PDF's at a time. That's on your bank, state institution, hospital or where applicable! Email, calendar and the likes: That's "embedded" on the browser. Why would you need to download your emails, once you can to see them at the provider's website platform? Again: Normally you won't need a specialty app to manage 5,000 emails at a time. Your bank, state institution, hospital or elsewhere where applicable will have those!... And distros should stop to provide Thunderbird on the basic installation! It's simply waste of time, space and resources better spent elsewhere! Display issues: While part of the thing maybe due to bad graphics card compatibility or bad general DE evolution within what's available; there are some tricks that may resolve part of the issues: Enlarge fonts; find more adequate ones; enlarge icons, are on the most common ones. Pretty much all DE's will let you to do so on their definitions app, or you download a tweaks app for that. If you're buying a new computer; please try to read some reviews on the hardware compatibility you're purchasing. There are usually some ones on the most used distros forums or elsewhere. Automation. The more or the less you want, Linux may provide it; and I'd say; SAFER than everywhere else, because those apps will only touch what you let them to touch. TBHH, that's not a problem for say 99% of the users. Again: Normally you don't need a structure to manage 500 PC's like if it was the same one working! Large entities will have them where applicable. Visual automation for specific tasks may or may not be needed for specific users, and they're popping up on DE's lately. I understand the accessibility for the disabled ones, but those are, by first hand experience, far lower on Linux than on Windows or Mac... And sadly for certain individuals they need to pay separately to have them even on those closed environments. Another story, but that is out of topic here. Badly written apps that won't conform with your OS is another subject that may prevent desired behavior, but those can be found elsewhere, even on Windows! And for the disabled they're a pain on our ... to say the least! Parent control: Again: What's the system where you can EASILY to create a new user with no administrator privileges nor privileges to call the administrator (basically no sudo or similar access) on said user? Windows is NOT the case; is it?... Even on the closest Windows user you can hijack a virus in less than a second!... Structurally if there is a system safe enough to let the kids to be kids is Linux, and I say it so sadly because basic safety should have been any SO's manufacturing business concern from the beginning!... But it isn't sadly! Again: That Linux has less apps, all of us know. That sometimes we forget to use wisely the resources we have on our hand is also true. So now in 99% of the homes what you need is a good parental control scheme on your browser. If your browser of choice doesn't have your desired level ones, there are tons of apps available, with an advantage on Linux. Install them on the user so that the kid can't change it. And by the way: You won't need your kid to access "that" specific app you use just for your work. Let their workspace to be as simple as possible! Excuse me if I'm so critical, but again; this is what I think by the most part as an user of pretty much every OS out there. No better nor worse ones. One need to use all of them wisely according to our needs and possibilities!... And have a nice day!...
IMO, Thunderbird becomes usable if you move the reading pane below the message list and turn on the "Quick Filter Messages" option. These two tweaks get rid of many of the situations you'd otherwise get tabs in or have to deal with a squished-feeling UI. Yeah, it needs a better flow for some settings, but it's leagues better than it used to be (and has become my preferred email client over Mac Mail and Outlook)
It is up to personal preferences but personally I keep the message pane turned off entirely and just open emails in tabs. If you need to cross check thing between two or more messages this is fantastic. And if you are reading just one message and want to focus on it that gives you the ability to have most of the screen dedicated to that message.
For editing PDFs I use pdftk which is a command line tool, which I used to use also on Windows. On Linux, PDFChain is a graphical frontend that allows to use many of the functionalities of pdftk.
While signing a pdf cryptographically is an important feature, there are specialised apps for this. I think that a pdf viewer should offer a handwritten or image signature instead. For example in Estonia we have eID software called DigiDoc. We can use it to sign pretty much anything with our ID cards. There is no need for this so called "feature" to exist in a pdf viewer, which on top of all is very half baked and requires you to jump through hoops.
Pretty much similar to what we have here in Portugal. Specialty app for that provided by the state, both for Windows, Mac, and Linux (Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian, Ubuntu) and add-onns for Google Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Oh, well: The browser ones should to work elsewhere. I have never need to use it either.
In Romania we have to sign fiscal documents with a qualified digital signature (I used an USB token, so not a drawing) and our government is behind others as there is no special app, we sign directly in a pdf field. Sometimes we also upload documents in the pdf forms, which does not work either on linux.
you can use the command line tool `pdfsig` to sign and verify pdfs, or you can use `openssl` or `gpgsm` to sign and verify basically any file. I am not sure about the actual implementation of Estonian eIDs, but as long as you have a pkcs11 compatible reader you should be able to interface with your eID from your system, including signing and encrypting email and files with any software supporting pkcs11.
Digital certificates for e-signatures are very important. Copy/pasting an image of the signature does not make it a legally binding and digitally signed e-document in my country. Only specific digital signatures (with those certificates) are a valid form of e-signing.
Dropping an image of a real signature is not a digital signature, almost no one *actually* needs a digital signature, we just need to be able to drop in a transparent image onto documents which should seriously be there as an option
In the context of PDFs the word "Signature" is a not so clear defined. It depends on the contract and country what is required. Sometime it could mean a files has to be digital signed. In other Situations only some kind of drawing is required. Okular can also let you draw onto the PDF via the Annotation Toolbar. th-cam.com/video/3FnvBEkcUZE/w-d-xo.html Similar to the last video. You could have mentioned Xournal++. This is a great tool to draw onto PDFs or use it as a digital paper similar to OneNote.
I do not use a mail client, I still use webmails. I do not use a calendar, I still use post-its. I must be older than my age. Anyway, regarding those, I know that is not necessarily the first soft that comes to mind, but has anyone ever tried those integrated in Vivaldi, to see if they're any decent ?
I think that even bigger problem for linux desktop is lack of not outdated GUI builder for gtk apps. the best GUI bulder we have is glade, it is still very buggy, only works up to gtk3, feels bad to use. Nowadays gtk developers not only have to program their applications in C, but design their application interface in FRICKING XML FILES!!!!1!!1 _(yes i know there exists official bindings for python, javascripts, vala, but they all have suboptimal performance, and rust in very hard to use in my experiance)_ Idk if it's just me, but i once was inspired to develop a gtk application, and it was HUGE pain in a butt to work with or to understand how it works. I think it would be a worthwhile investment to develop a better gtk GUI builder, the one that designers could use to create application interfaces that are actually usable for regular people.
I absolutely agree with your points... there's now Cambalanche, a GTK app prototyping software that seems to be somewhat capable and from what I read, a similar module called 'drafting' will be soon implemented in GNOME Builder. But yeah, GNOME has definitely neglected some of the UX aspects in favor of good UI, but they're making good progress it seems.
Forget GTK, which is also developed by GNOME developers. For example, Canonical has been developing its own apps with Dart/Flutter for some time. Dart/Flutter is modern and available for many platforms.
my personal main issue is always just one thing being an issue during the setup process. once something is setup I can completely forget about it, but it can feel so incomplete to get there, I recently had 2 things, 1 was setting up a server where I had to make sure stuff just mounts on boot and the other is just where to find some customization options in the GUI of my garuda / kde system I'll never have to touch either of those again for a few years, but each took me much to long to work through compared to the remaining parts of setting up. For the permanent mount, if I'd had a GUI, there'd be tools, but over CLI this should have also just been an extra parameter when using the mount command instead of an edit of system files. For the customization ... well really the only thing that could be improved here would actually have been people in forums just shutting up if they have nothing to contribute other then "use the forums search function"... Apparently that's not working well enough. Find a post with a good answer + maybe show how you found it or just directly answer the question. No matter where else the options would end up, someone would still search for it. And if not for this same thing, something else would have gotten more hidden. 🤷
I would add full install to USB. Witness the large variety of youtube videos, articles and third-party tools to create bootable USB's with persistence. Even the information that full install bootable USB's can be created seems to be hidden in many distros - one of my favorites hides the USB install capability in the "something else" section and seems to default the target drive to my internal Windows hard drive other the only other target USB than the Demo USB being run. Once making it to the install program, many, if not most distros present a large number of options and ask for choices that I don't understand - how about an "option" to install to USB with a suggested best partition structure keeping me from touching my internal hard drive? I would guess that most new Linux users install first to USB drives - why make it so hard to do full installs to boot USBs. When I finally did manage to get a full install to USB to work with my favorite distro, the USB took 5 minutes to boot and I was glad to finally get it to work. I really didn't know if that was just how things worked, options were available to make my distro boot faster or if I'd done something wrong. With lots and lots and lots of help from the linux community, I did figure out how to get my USB boot drive to boot in a little over a minute instead of 5 minutes. I'm not sure why my system boots 5 times faster now, but here are my guesses - 1) When installing to a USB, do not have any more drives connected than absolutely necessary - in my case only the source Live Demo USB and the target full install USB - my internal Windows hard drive is physically disconnected for its protection from me and Linux installations) Drives and drive settings /etc/fstab may have an effect on boot time. (2) The first installation screen seems to vary depending on what is on the target full install boot USB, so I started always formatting the target USB with the USB Stick Formatter menu choice before each installation attempt - this seemed to help get more consistent results. (3) Apparently the organization of the partitions makes quite a difference - I believe this is where I found most of my faster boot speed - if there is a best choice - why does the installer not suggest it - in my case only two USB drives connected - one I'm running and the target.
As someone who's only ever used Linux as a way to extend the lifespan of an old laptop, I think the reason is that full USB installs are a niche application of an already kinda niche OS -- especially if you're running on hardware with USB 2.0, you're probably gonna get better performance out of installing it on a HDD or SSD anyway. Heck, the only common-ish use I see for a USB disk install of a distro is for something like a Raspberry Pi, where the issue is that the only other option is an SD card, and the read/writes of a daily driver OS can be really bad for them.
@@digitalcalibrator9740 I have to admit that running from a boot USB seems to be rare and almost intentionally made difficult by some distros. For myself, I have 3 windows laptops and I took the oldest slowest laptop which had become almost unusably slow for windows using the internal hard drive and started out booting linux distros from USBs just to find out a little about Linux. While not without a few issues, much to my surprise, my slowest laptop runs plenty fast for me with linux off of a USB drive - laptop even has only USB 2.0. This led me to changing my perspective on what I want. In the past, I considered the operating system and the associated computer as being magically intertwined. Now, I use any of my dozen or so distro / desktop LInux USB drives piled near my desk on any of my 3 laptops - making the cpu just another tool. The operating system doesn't singularly matter - if for some reason, a drive fails me or I don't like something, I just pick another from my stack - I do keep my data on a separate data only USB drive that I backup regularly. I do know which laptop I'm running at the moment, but it is not really that important. I'm running the slowest one that is plenty fast for me with Linux with the Windows internal hard drive unplugged to protect it from me and unintentional (default) linux installs. The lid is closed with a big monitor, usb drives, mouse, full size keyboard and speakers or headphones plugged in. I have a set of applications that like which will ideally will run on any distro or at least save files in a common format that can be used, including with Windows.
I agree that pdf editing is a Linux grey area. I use Master PDF editor, which is paid for, but I think it's worth the money; it works well for editing, marking up, adding/removing pages, signing, inserting images, or links to photos or other docs, and is also pretty good on OCR. Thunderbird works well for me and on Mint XFCE or MX Linux looks good with my setup. Actually I've always used it even 20+ years ago on XP; as they say in Yorkshire "there's nowt so queer as folk". Nonetheless, Linux is still so much easier to use than MS or Apple's offerings.
My issue might be a bit more niche than most. I'm visually impaired, and while I don't need to use a screen reader, I can't recommend Linux to any of my friends or associates like me that do use them. ORCA seems to be the only option on Linux and it's very rough around the edges in a lot of cases, or just plain won't work in others. The voice that it uses puts a lot of people off as well, and while I've heard rumors of better voices being able to be installed, I have yet to find a decent tutorial on it. Windows has Narrator, NVDA, and JAWS (if you want to pay big money for it), and Mac has Voice Over. I wish Linux could get something equivalent.
Right now there is literally no way to digitally sign a pdf with a smart card on linux. Using LibreOffice draw does not have the same functions as using adobe acrobat, which allows you to unsign and see other signature properties.
The reason I can't run Linux is because there's no Adobe Photoshop. GIMP does not have any of the AI tools I use all the time, so that's not an option.
Technically you can. I use Photoshop CC 2018 through a specific Wine installation I found online. It works with a few bugs here and there and it allows pen pressure.
@@MastermindAtWork I've been down that route before. It was partially working but it had major problems and I could not get my pen tablet to work with it so I ended up needing to run windows OS on a separate display with KVM. It's broken and slow without a dedicated GPU so I needed to add a separate GPU for the Windows OS. I spent multiple entire days trying to get it all working with KVM integrated into my main desktop. I ended up having problems with graphics drivers. I don't have time to go through all that again. It was a nightmare.
I just had the need to sign a PDF document, and after quite some time of research on the interwebs, someone suggested Xournal to do it. And it works! It can basically insert an image of your signature in any PDF, then you re-export it and voilà: you have a signed PDF. Apparently, it can also add & delete pages, but I didn't see any option to reorder them. Didn't test it for PDF forms though.
Maybe Xournal++ fits your needs for PDF editing. It's more of a note taking app and thus might not be perfect for PDF editing, but it does everything I occasionally need to edit. You can add stuff like textboxes and images to the PDF and there is a pen tool. You can even rearrange the newly placed objects with a select tool.
An instant pain I had with Linux(specifically Zorin OS Lite 16.2) is when I tried to simulate an install my aunt would do if she was switching from Windows(on Virtualbox 7 on my Acer Aspire 3 laptop running W10 LTSC). Since there is no MS Office,I got the closest thing in store: WPS Office,through their .deb app in their site. The problem was with language. WPS doesn't input letters with diacritics(such as é,ô,ã and í,which are pretty common in brazillian portuguese),unless I change the language from the english default(which idk why it was like that since my system was already in PT-BR),but the problem was I could not figure out where the fuck they put the language option on their UI,and when I changed(by downloading a langpack from the AUR's website,and then proceeding to extensively search in XFCE's forums for an hour about why the living fuck Thunar doesn't understand I wanna copypaste a folder from my downloads to /opt/kingsoft/office6/mui,which is the path in WPS for the language packs in case you're wondering),now WPS wasn't only refusing to input the diacritics but also it wasn't recognizing entire letters(with my keyboard properly setup to 105 keys PT-BR no dead keys during the install,which is the default on most laptops here). And I refuse to use LibreOffice unless they become the damn thing they say they are(a 100% MS Office-compatible suite that is FOSS,which is cap because it's overcomplicated as hell on their settings,and the interface shouldn't take more than a minute to swap from dated Office 2003 to 2013's Ribbon without requiring YT tutorials to show where the exact path is due to how convoluted all this program is),OnlyOffice still hasn't catch up yet,and Softmaker FreeOffice... Let's pretend it didn't happen. I just want an interface that is cohesive,looks good and allows me to do everything through it. Zorin OS almost does its job,UKUI is pretty close,Deepin perfected it(at the cost of packages availability and performance),but having to do all of this for the program to not work is the reason why I still think Linux needs improvements before we can see ppl migrating to it en masse.
The one with the PDF is a really good point. I like the way that Preview handles PDFs on macOS better than anything else on any other platform. Email is actually not that great. I could not find a solution that works as well as MS Outlook or Apple Mail. Another thing is the native desktop apps for Whatsapp and Telegram. I've reduced to using the browser for these. I have browser window with pinned tabs for my different email accounts. It works the best in this situation. It is the reason that I would choose macOS as my daily driver and later on in the coming year. At the moment, I am running FreeBSD with KDE desktop. It is really good and I like the setup I have. I can handle the email. But the PDF, this makes me want to get a macOS system as soon as possible.
I started using Bluemail everywhere. It has less features than thunderbird (I especially miss the advanced search) but works really well and I can have the same setup on my phone and work PC running windows.
actually i never cared about email client, as mostly use web mail anyway even in windows, only place i use desktop mail is outlook on work system, but there i get nearly 1000 mails a day and i need it supper organised to at least keep up...
@@vaisakh_km the filtering in bluemail is great but I don't think it has the performance to handle 1000 mails a day. I remember I heard about a free mass mail organization tool but I can't recall the name.
Okular got so good with time. For some of the things I think you could use masterpdfeditor, has a Flatpak I recon. Gnome apps for mail and calendar look good. Might install them on my KDE rig. Tried to get my outlook account to work once with the KDE apps and as you mention the process was too complex so I didn't bother. I'm a medical student, so I tent to use my PC for productivity a lot. One day went with the Mac KVM rabbit hole and whole and behold I now rock Mac as my productivity OS. Synchronisation with my outlook mail, calendar, to-do/reminder app, man it's wonderful. As much as I like okular, I find myself prefering Adobe's reader as I get all my medical books on PDFs and I highlight and draw a lot on the PDFs. I adore my Fedora KDE install. Prior to installing Mac it was my main OS. What would have sounded impossible a few years back, now is the reality - I rock only Linux on my gaming rig. When I really need to be productive, I find Mac a bit easier. In terms of scaling, I just can't get a nice scale of 125% for my GF's notebook. Maybe ubuntu does it somewhat OK. I am sure we will get there eventually.
Dude! I have the exact same gripes! the pdf thing really shouldn't be this bad. Like you said, the macOS solution is simple and just works. It's great! I don't know anything about coding, but there really should be someone on this.
The PDF problems you pointed are quite an issue. Another issue I have is with Libre Office, the document layout and the way the toolbar is laid out does not look good. Plus, It always shows boxes in Libre Writer around the images, which looks weird for someone coming from MS Office. In terms of overall look and feel, OnlyOffice looks way better, but it lacks feature. Lack of availability of compatible Hardware is another major issue, I have to ask my friend to get a HP Dev One and still waiting for the arrival 🤣.
Oh GOD! You SPOKE MY HEART!! It has been so confusing these truly Linux pains! Seriously it makes it so difficult to fully switch to Linux. I have been using iCloud web, just because Thunderbird... well... sucks! PDF! ah... you said everything about it. Calendar and contacts.... awch!
Inkscape and Scribus both can edit PDFs as long as they aren't too large (in which case, both will crash). Also, Evolution is great at contacts and calendaring. It supports CardDAV, CalDAV and Exchange, and Google for contacts and calendaring. It's still part of GNOME.
Another pain point for me is the interoperability of Linux. Sure Linux can mount pretty much all drives no matter of how they are formated, but Windows and Mac just do not. Of course you can format your drive to something else in advance. When you are at a different system, plug your USB drive in and the drive does not show up, Captain Hindsight won't help if the USB is formated in eg. ext4. So Linux is a good toolbox, but it still turns into a bit of a one way street that it's harder to move away from.
My two big pain points are: Sane defaults. Things like click to open, app store search defaults, no minimize/maximize, no tap to click on touchpads, etc. Other one is no sudo functionality on many graphical apps. Windows equivalent would be right-clicking as administrator. My password is what is supposed to protect my system files, not the developer thinking I'm too stupid to save a config file because I'm using the GUI text editor.
Considering most users are just wanting a basic email and browser experience, access to write a doc or view video. I think Linux is great value ‘free’ product, for the average daily drive, depending on the flavour you choose.
Thanks everyone for suggesting solutions to these problems in the comments. After switching from Windows to Linux about 6 months ago I've definitely run into some of these problems so it's really helpful hearing about the tools you've used to get around them.
Of your points the ones that affect me most (I'm one of the old people that use webmail - I used to use Thunderbird but decided offline storage in my ISP of emails was safer for me, so I use their webmail) are the PDF thing and the fonts thing. For editing PDFs I use LibreOffice and just put up with the inconvenience, so I'd like to see a better app for concatenating PDFs, moving pages around and adding/deleteing/editing PDFs that has some smarts to allow the "flow" of the text to be taken into account. This could probably be done by improving the PDF import in LibreOffice. although there would still be the problem of affecting the layout which may or may not be a problem, depending on what you are trying to do. As for fonts, I find some applications seem to use default fonts that are tiny, with no way to change the fonts because they ara using defait fonts, and possibly were developed for a different window manager and don't pick up the right font sizes or something like that. On occasions I've found ways of setting environment variables in launchers to fix these problems, but I shouldn't have to. Perhaps window managers should set these variables for applications looking for them when the fonts are set in their setup apps, at least for the major window managers like KDE, MATE, CINNAMON etc. The app that is worse for this for me is KiCAD, but Prusaslicer has some aggegiously small fonts too on my computer, to the extent I have to change glasses to read them. Probably not a problem for young people like yourself! One of the biggest problems with email in a corporate context is compatability with corporate email systems. Evolution has some support for Outlook, maybe its better these days with Microsoft showing more of an interest in Linux, but it really needs to get to the point where changes to the Windows client and the Linux clients come at roughly the same time for organisations to want to use Linux as a client platform. I can't see this happening unless Microsoft loses interest in monetising client licences and moves the cost to the server software. Personally I am not bothered too much by the "UX experience" on Evolution as long as it is functional and not arcance, but I understand the look is a concern for some and no company really wants to be using really old fashioned looking software even if it is excellent "under the hood". I've not really thought about the automation aspect, but then before I retired my job was writing scripts to automate business processes, so I've never had to think about the need for people less experienced on the command line (which lets face it, is most users and those we need to attract to Linux) in this regard. It does seem to me it need not be all that hard to develop a graphcal "script builder" along the lines of scratch that responds to system events or monitors parts of the file system and performs a series of simple actions. many graphical applications have a command-line interface that allows certain actions, and they could install action definitions into the graphical automation application. What really is needed to start is for a small group of interested parties to define the file and data structures required and start a discussion so that other projects have something to refer to and we don't end up in traditional style with an array of competing API's and applications that can't be made to interact properly or implement easily.
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I have a Huawei Matebook D15 and it's using Everest driver for audio. Unfortunately, until now there is no working driver for my laptop and I really wanted to switch to Linux.
just came over here to dislike here too and let you know I told you off on odysee 😹😹😹
Firefox can do the PDF stuff you want.
Okular: You can create a custom 'stamp' in the settings and use an image of your signature. This is utterly hidden and the devs know about this, this will get better soonish.
Ohhhh Nice! I’ll look at that! Thanks!
@@winlux2 Thanks, yes this works well
Oh damn, this is nice. Although I wish there was a way to resize the 'stamp'. But super useful nonetheless. Thanks.
Yes, okular is a great tool !
This. Signed all my uni documents with okular. It was hidden in the settings and is still a pain to use tho (can save only one sign)
Pro tip. Although it's not made for that, Inkscape 1.2 is actually the best tool I found for editing PDFs on Linux.
The latest 1.2 version allows you to open the PDF files, rearrange pages, add or move elements, and best of all, edit any text that's already in the PDF. And it doesn't break the layout at all.
Once you open the file, you just need to ungroup all the elements by pressing ctrl+shift +g a couple of times.
It's a life saver, and haven't found anything better, even after trying many other alternatives, including the ones mentioned in this video.
Thanks, does it even allow you to make rectangular selections and copy them? I'm really excited to try this.
Will it allow you to digitally sign a PDF? Will it enable you to read a Military ID card (CAC) and digitally sign? This is a MAJOR issue; and could conceivable prevent me from going to Linux.
I absolutely agree!
I second this, works really well
I'm going to take it that no one knows the answer to this question...
Parental Control is key if we plan on having Linux in schools, which is how so many people picked up apple in the 80s and pcs in the 90s
Yeah, we really need to get better at this
Parental control sadly goes against much of "core user" Linux mentality - having full access to your system and being able to change anything if you just want to enough. This means that the systems are built in a way to allow that, so retrofitting parental control sounds like a nightmare
@@jan-lukas i dont know, it should be pretty easy to use PAM to only allow members of certain groups to access certain applications, and to set a limit on how long a session can be open for each day. To then have this managed via LDAP would be ideal.
Things would just be easier if we treated children like untrusted applications, which lets be honest, they are.
@@jan-lukas Considering the owner of the system is the parent and the parent wants control, he/she should be given that. It's no difference to a business owner's policies for securing a work computer, really!
Agreed 100%, and not having good parental controls on Linux beyond restricting root/super user access on a separate user account is why I ended up giving my stepdaughter an Walmart ONN Android GO tablet, and a Bluetooth keyboard, and making a kids account so I have control over what apps go onto it with some remote monitoring, same with her Alcatel Android GO Edition phone.
Okular offering a 'digital signature' option literally means a cryptographic signature. Why this, a feature probably used by less than 1% of users, was a priority over an actual drawn signature is beyond me.
Yeah, it’s so weird!
Because in the real world the drawn signature has 0 value. If you really want to use it, just put a png.
You can't use it as an official document without a real signature.
TBF - digital signatures that are crypto based is one of the things that was actually stopping me from using linux full time... There are millions of people who actually use this feature. I have no use for signing something digitally though with a drawn signature, that has 0 legal use... there is no non-repudiation at all.
@@talkysassis but even that's a massive struggle
Probably because they aimed this feature at big companies and organizations, I dare even say, mainly government sectors.
I always felt that Linux was for power users first, developers second, and maybe depending on the app the DE the weather the time of day and the users diet, regular users
A-a usable Linux setup?! At this time of day, at this time of year, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your office?!... May I see it?
Totally agree 👍
I was using arch Linux but i found that I need to learn some programming languages as I wanna be a developer so I got back to windows 10, but I'm sure that one day I will switch to Linux cause I like it.
@@KelvinShadewing Sure and what you'll see is a usable FreeBSD desktop instead.
-(joke)-
@@yousefkhalifa7796 why would you need to swap to windows to learn programming that makes no sense
@@KelvinShadewing Yes, and you call it Linux despite the fact that it's obviously GNU/Linux.
I think that signature is a cryptographic signature. Both types of signatures are useful and needs to be supported
you're right, a digital or electronic signature is by definition a cryptographic signature. Putting an image of a drawn signature into an electronic document is not signing it. This is something a lot of people struggle with to understand.
@@onehaxxor8574 somehow you did not get a heart for this explanation.....
@@onehaxxor8574 I think it's not that people don't understand this, but more like the mechanism of setting up and applying a digital signature in such a way that it can be globally verified is basically impossible from what I can tell.
So you might as well just stamp it with a scan of your signature
How would an image of your handwriting ensure anything though, you can easily modify the contents of the file, or copy that signature and paste it onto some other pdf file. I sorta get the uses for digital signatures, but these days emails and chat apps are protected by a very similar signature technology (DKIM/SSL), so it's really easy to verify the source of the file.
@@Yutaro-Yoshii it doesn't ensure anything. Much like how a real signature can also be forged. In the end you just want to get things done and that's just the way it is. I doubt it'll be changed until there's is a very easy way for people to do digital signatures, perhaps using an official national ID or something like that
Out of all the email clients, I actually prefer Thunderbird. I've been using it even when I was on Windows. So moving over to Linux, it works well for me. They have updated the interface over the last 6 months or so. What I really like about it is it's so easy to organise emails via dates and topic. Then when it's time to archive, they're already in their own years. Or simply close it and it's pretty much hidden. One other great thing about it is if your distro ever breaks, it's relatively easy to just copy the directory contents straight over the newly installed app and you'll have all your emails and settings as they were before.
Yeah, I don't have a big issue with Thunderbird either. it works fine.
This video is soooo spot on!!! You just covered all my major gripes with apps on Linux. PDF editing has been a pain point for me for a loooong time!
Master PDF editor is decent on Linux
You kinda have to pick between good reader and terrible editor and decent editor but terrible reader.
Xournal refusing to let me select text or mark text directly is so annoying. Its by far the worst thing about Linux PDS. If it had that one feature, it would be the best PDF editor ever.
Put your primary monitor to the right of your secondary in KDE, then try and summon the context menu (right click on something). This bug has been around for more than a decade: KDE blames QT, and QT blames KDE.
Is this not supposed to work? I get my context menu just like I expect to on my right screen that is set to primary...
??? You could always just yell at Nicco
Parental control would sure be a nice thing, but I think that the amount of potential users is so low that it's not worth it at all. Plus we all know that the FOSS community won't agree to one base line standard but create like 30 different standards which do the exact same thing but work different and require extra development time.
The default pdf editor/viewer (Preview) and the default Mail app on macOS are really some of the most underrated parts of that operating system. It was only when I built my Linux workstation that I realized how much I used those and even Windows has garbage alternatives.
Is the macOS default PDF viewer able to display 3D content embedded in PDFs?
@@ettoreatalan8303 Not sure - i've never had any 3d content in any of the pdfs I have seen. Most PDF work I do is signing documents or annotating them and it works great for those things.
You had the same experience with signing the PDF that LTT had. Basically, there's putting your signature on the bottom, and then there's cryptographically signing it. You both were trying to do with the latter, which is why it was so much harder. So technically, it was actually doing it properly.
Yeah, but adding the ability to just sign it by hand should be the priority, right?
what's the solution then?
@@TheLinuxEXP Your hand writing is different then by signing it on the PC. I print the form, sign it and scan it from my phone to do the PC. I think OnlyOffice has form filler where you could fill in. You could even make entire PDF from scratch.
99% of users will never try to sign a Pdf cryptographically, they will try to put a goddam signature on it
@@claudiojaramillo5177 They wont bother even trying to do it on linux because it's such a pain in the ass. There are millions of people in the US alone that use that feature.. literally every government contractor, military member, and government employee use it... If we want to see linux get a major foothold on the desktop, then people need to start seeing it at work. yeah, there are millions of people who don't need it, but there is also 1.4 million service members who do use it, and thousands of federal contractors. Get the government using it on the desktops, and you'll see a shift in user base at home. It's a feature that has a larger demand than people think...
Sounds like I have a useful project to work on: an open-source lightweight PDF viewer/editor that actually has useful features like visual signing 😆
How about instead of starting another one add the Feature to the Gnome builtin?
@@emeukal7683 because I don't like it. I have my own aspirations.
could you just port something from android?
@@seanld444 Good luck with that :)
@@emeukal7683 Because we don't all use Gnome. I use Cinnamon on both Debian and Mint. I also like Mate, though I don't use it at the moment.
Signing PDFs is a feature I didn't know you even needed. In Sweden we have digital identities provided by our banks. All digital signing happens through this signing process. It feels weird that you slapp an image on top of a PDF and somehow that image is binding that digital document to you? It must be extremely easy to falsify documents like those. :) In case of our signing process, the bank functions like a trust, where they have validated the digital identity with the real life person. And the system is de-centralized.
My biggest gripe with Linux is the lack of new features. Like HDR and fractional scaling, or latest GPU software features. Generally you are several years behind everyone else. I have always found Linux to be best suited for older hardware. Meanwhile those always wanting to be on the bleeding edge suffer in Linux. Other than that, I would like better UI consistency. But due to how open the desktop environment is, I understand why it's extremely hard to get a consistent user experience.
yep , dunno who would accept those , I wouldnt
My biggest gripe is a standard thing on Windows: proper GUI control panel for the GPU. Nvidia kinda has one, but AMD and Intel are lacking it and it is really needed for properly tuning your GPU.
@@alpha13sierra hmm amd has a proper one , what does it lacking?
@@terrydaktyllus1320 yeah... sure , maybe you should upgrade your old garbage pc
@@terrydaktyllus1320 good so you can shut up and enjoy your garbage pc and stop blaming windows which it seems you haven't even tried out
custom linux installations... wtf how many times do you need to install it? does it break each month? :O
Great job compiling this list. This is by far the most practical list I’ve come across. I keep windows on every computer as a backup for PDF editing - luckily I don’t have to do much of that these days.
And you’re so right with mail apps. I’ve been jumping from thunderbird, evolution, neomutt and now currently using Geary which has its own issues.
I wonder what other people's thoughts are on Vivaldi for email / calendar. -I've been using them, but I'm mostly used to webmail and google calendar.
@@madthumbs1564 many won't even bother to try because Vivaldi isn't open source sadly
I stumbled upon mailspring while watching this vid, looks like it will be my choice when I eventually move away from gmail
@@yamaddie I have heard about mainspring. I guess I should give it a try. I moved away from gmail for the most part. Do my own email hosting. Feels better to have more control but PIB for setting it up.
i just use my phone....oneplus5t android does it seamlessly via any of dozens/hundreds of apps........
why we gotta hunt for just 1 or split it over multiple?
why are we YEARS behind when we all know full well devs have phones too
Wow, I didn’t even know that you can fill in something in PDF. I thought this format was only for viewing. This is probably due to the fact that this way of working with documents is not very common in my region.
I'm glad I grew up in a time when there were no parental controls. I learned to consciously find content that really suits me, as well as independently repair the system after my actions. It taught me responsibility.
That was the original intent, then adobe bloated it (or is their viewer/optional pay for bits) adding a pile of extras I'm not interested in, but are forced to take on just to be up to date software wise.
Vidéo editing is also pretty lacking in my opinion. Really the most accomplished editor is DaVinci Resolve but it doesn't even have h264 support on it's free tier. Kdenlive, shotcut or olive are really just good for small a light effects
Yeah they’re more iMovie than anything else
In fairness, the video editors everyone uses on Windows are paid, so complaining that the free tier of one on Linux is useless is kind of silly. If you need to do some heavy editing work, you pay for it, regardless of the platform.
For basic editing ShotCut really has served me well, but you're right, it's really lacking.
@@MrGamelover23 resolve on windows is usable
@@MrGamelover23 The problem is that it has that support on the free Windows version.
I use KDE, and naturally I use Kmail for the integration. And you're absolutely right, it can be overwhelming to set up. But I think one of the joys of using KDE is the tinkering and configuring it. I recently set up a Gmail account in it, and there is a guided set up that made it easy, but it's not obvious where it is. I also connected a proton mail account using proton mail bridge. Both just work perfectly, and honestly I hope it never becomes less feature rich even if that means it stays complicated. It could use more/better tutorials though. Maybe I should make some.
my current struggle with Kmail is it's soo bare bones in displaying html email which I get all the time which is why I ended up on mailspring. it doesn't entirely match my DE but it works well for what I need for calendar I just use Teams since I have to have it for work any ways. having said that blue mail is pretty decent for calendar but it's a mess for email and I just abbandoned contacts I just add them from my phone and sync them with my Computer
Aside from nerds, I don't know anyone who enjoys tinkering and configuring applications. The application should just work as expected, and the average user is fine. A love affair with IT will never happen for most average users anyway.
I usually use Inkscape for doing stuff with PDFs. It's meant to do things with SVGs, but it does the job reasonably well. Still a bit of a pain though lol.
I've had very few issues in terms of displays, well except XFCE struggles to accept more than one display without getting the display profile set up, but it's pretty easy to fix.
I really felt the real talk about the PDF viewers. There are many tech reviewers out there who are like "You can do everything with Linux". When I opened the first time Okular, I traveled back to 2005 concerning design and features. If you ever worked with Adobe Acrobat Pro you know what I mean.
Well you maybe able to, just get Wine to work....
Then add Mac, iPhone, & Android to the mix - nirvana?
I avoid all adobe products by default.
It's not wrong though, you really can do everything with Linux, just some things take more effort than others lolol
What can you not do with Okular?
Regarding Signing PDF, I use Microsoft Edge which somehow have a great integrated PDF engine that allows ink signing and form filling which will STICK to the file itself.
It do not support Digital Signing (with Cerificate). But yea.... its Microsoft....
Firefox pdf is pretty good
@@paulg3336 Firefox is a worse Browser and pdf is worse. Give IT to Microsoft where they deserve it. Edge and vscode are great, Windows is overal the best os. Tracking sucks..
Something like Protonmail or similar solves the problem quite easily. I never understood the need to download emails to my computer or having a mail client installed. And yes, the pdf problem is quite annoying.
Agreed. Email clients can introduce more problems. They take up more space on the drive. You can get duplicate emails downloading, etc.
Because email clients have a plethora of features, options automation, all useful for workplace environments.
20+ year Linux user here, and I agree 100% about the disaster that it interacting with PDFs. Here's how I get by: 1) Master PDF Editor, as others mentioned. There's an older version that lets you save edits without a watermark if you search a bit. 2) PDFstudioViewer by Qoppa software. It's basically a Java clone of the old Adobe Reader that used to be available for Linux. And finally, PDF XChange Editor by Tracker Software (terrible company name), it's a Windows program that runs perfectly under Wine.
You're absolutely spot on about PDFs editing in Linux. I use Linux Mint and I finally had to buy Master Pdf, unfortunately. Thank you.
Is Master PDF working for you? Not mugging fonts etc …
@@matthewb4399 I don't understand exactly what you are asking for. Anyway, I don't use advanced pdf editing, if that your case. Cheers and Merry Christmas.
My biggest problem with linux is that there is no option to adjust trackpad 2 finger scrolling speed. The default speed is way too fast it flies way past what I need
For E-Mail I use Mailspring (on KDE and Gnome), while it usually takes a little to start up, it's a really solid program. Although it doesn't really look 'native', it certainly doesn't look bad. It's very legible and easy to setup, has features like combined inbox, delayed mail send, signatures, mail rules, templates and all the basics you would want. It also allows for some basic customization
named what I'm saying about mailspring far from perfect but for sure does what I want
For PDFs I use Xournal++ which lets me put images (my signature) and text wherever I want. Open source and is also available on Windows if you multiboot
I work at a university. All the people I work with use either Windows or Apple. 95% of them use web apps for mails and calendars, the rest uses Thunderbird like me and that is all we ever wanted.
One reason I was happy to change to linux was PDF handling, in contrast to that horrible adobe brick you have to use on windows and if you just want to look in a different way at a pdf, you already need the pro suite, or so it seems like. I am glad that the third party solutions are not as sketchy as on windows.
Display stuff... does display things for a normal 1080p monitor. I don't know anyone personally who uses a monitor with a higher resolution and we certainly don't have any of those at work. Dual monitors with different resolutions can be tricky sometimes, yes.
Autom-what? Never felt the need for that and don't know anyone at university that does.
I never saw parental control stuff on windows, I have only seen that first on a linux distro.
I mean, I can see why some of those things can be slightly annoying to a few, but with none of the points mentioned here I have any actual issues. And I don't know any Windows or Apple user who would have a problem with those things when changing to linux. So I can only assume that those things are only issues for certain people and/or for specific tasks one has or wants to do with a computer. And that "wants to" is actually a thing to consider. Since the time Apple became "cool" and Android started and Windows went along a bit with it, these companies seem to force a certain way how to use a computer and I never followed that. So I have no issue when linux distros do not provide those things. To the contrary, I am happy those things are not forced on me.
So to me, linux not having features that Apple and Windows provide is a pro, cause to me those features are bugs sold as features.
Atril PDF viewer (the default viewer for MATE) has no issue with PDF input forms; which is weird, since it's basically a fork of the GNOME viewer. For digital signing, you can use poppler, which has a digital signature tool in its poppler-utils package. And for actual editing (and all of the above as well), my go to choice is Master PDF editor. Even in its free edition, it offers a lot more than Adobe professional ever did.
In other words, good solutions exist (at least for this issue), they just haven't been adopted by the "fancy" desktop environments yet.
But, in my opinion, these are minor; first, we have more serious problems to solve. Like, I don't know, upgrading your distribution WITHOUT breaking half the user's installation!!!!
That is 3(!) solutions for 1(!) problem. No wonder, people drift towards Apple's walled garden and their apps. And I am working with all 3 major OS these days.
Using the Thunderbird addon "Monterail Dark" makes the UI bearable for the time being.
Thanks, I’ll give it a shot!
Linux has a special place in my heart, but this and many other reasons are why I'm starting to see the world like Chris Titus; treating OSes almost like apps, whether through emulation or additional hardware. I think you need to be more mercenary in your choices, no matter how great you think Linux is.
If there are more people like you complaining about how doing basic stuff in Linux is so hard that you can easily do in other operating systems. Then Linux community would have fixed this kind of issues making Linux number one operating system in the world.
It's weird to say this but for drawing on PDF, I downloaded Microsoft Edge as their PDF drawing is pretty good (I don't know if you can arrange PDFs though)
The fact that thunderbird exists in its current state is beyond me and the fact that it is shipped with some major distros is upsetting
I remember asking about parental controls in Linux. Everyone told me to be a better parent rather than restrict things on the computer. It really made me angry at the community.
It’s such a dumb answer. Of course you can’t watch your kid every second he spends on a computer
@@TheRikkieh Hey, I think you need to educate yourself with what a parental control is. Here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_controls. Thank me later.
@@TheRikkieh buddy, the fact that an 8 year old is going to grow up and watch porn when they’re older doesn’t mean they should be exposed to people having sex while they’re still 8. More importantly, young kids would probably download more malware than a grandma would, and parents need to be able to control that, especially since kids generally use their parents computer. Also, if you think parents have the time or energy to watch their kids like a hawk 24/7, you’re out of your mind
What's the difference between using parental control software and the sysadmin at your work giving you a restricted account that won't let you install software and keeps you out of most of the file system? Sounds like they're basically the same thing to me.
Sometimes it's hard to handle the truth and I understand that. I highly encourage you to go with better parenting (educating your kid, preparing for encounters of different types of materials, etc) rather than restricting things on the computer. When you're a parent, you're responsible, please remember that. I wish you and your children good luck and prosperity.
I use GIMP to edit PDFs. Pages become layers (enables the addition and deletion of pages), alignment tool can be used to ensure any edits are neat and organized, signature can be pasted or drawn. I just save the project as a PDF again once I'm finished.
That said, there really should be a more accessible option for doing these types of edits included with most distributions. Most people have to work with PDFs at one point or another, so lacking such a feature or application could be a big turn off for many newcomers.
I didn't know even GIMP can edit PDFs nowadays. Do all these apps like Firefox, Chrome, Inkscape, SumatraPDF etc. have their own library for that?
@@CTimmerman Inkscape can do basic edits on PDFs.
That HDR support is one of the things, that is stopping me from using linux. Others would be worse options with major streaming companies, worse gaming options and general software/hardware support, worse stability than Windows (your experience might vary of course). Dont get me wrong, there are advantages as well of course. Some of the DEs are beautiful (Zorins Gnome spin, Cinnamon Manjaro...), you can adjust them way more, you have more security/privacy etc. It is just that linux is still far from being that great to average people, who watch streams TVs, play games, sometimes work (MS office). I have never met that "grandma who just uses browser". If she is not just a legend than yeah, linux might be great for her. And for all the tech-savvy people who spend most of the time in terminal. If you want to do more than browse the internet and you dont want to go outside of GUI (ie use terminal), than there is still a long way to go for linux. And I hope for it to be succesful!
Concerning PDF: my workflow as a researcher involves a ton of PDF highlighting, adding notes etc. Even though the stock apps (Evince, Okular) support it, the UX has never been that great. But recently, Zotero added a PDF reader/annotator, and that one is genuinely great, highly recommended! It's not a full-featured PDF solution, so it wouldn't probably help with all the tasks mentioned in the video, but that's also an advantage, as it can afford to optimize the UX for the note-taking workflow.
Also, I think it's worth mentioning that while I very much like the UI of Preview on macOS (mostly -- sometimes the ToC disappears and it's non-obvious how to make it come back; search is wonky; dark mode was unreadable in places upon rollout), it has let me down multiple times over the years as far as data integrity goes. Disappearing or corrupted annotations, irrecoverably corrupted OCRed text under scanned page image, I'm sure I'm forgetting some.
master pdf seems powefull to
Yes PDF editing is a pain on Linux, you can also use Inkscape to edit them, but I decided to buy a license for Master PDF. With that, I can do everything needed to edit the PDFs.
I also bought VueScan for my document scanner and Turpoprint for the printer because they didn't work 100% on Linux either.
Whats the point if you are buying software?
@@liudas5377
Hello
The reason why I bought software is quite simple, the existing open source software partly does not support my hardware anymore, like for example my document scanner. The backend SANE, which most scanning software on Linux needs, has a bug for my scanner that has not been fixed for ages and is therefore unusable for me.
With Turobrint I have additionally supports the CMYK color model, I can add my own ICC color spaces and even produce color-consistent proof prints of CMYK documents.
And the PDF stuff has already been explained in the video
@@liudas5377 You can simultaneously use Linux and pay for software. You simply choose not to pay for the bloated broken mess that Windows is.
When talking about calendars you missed probably the best one: Kalendar- it manages contacts, todos and events (for now)
Kale dad is awesome! I wish they re did Kmail on the same way
@@TheLinuxEXP It's nearly Christmas so wishes may just come true 🎅
1:36 Ah, the LTT digitally signing a PDF issue... 😂
To be fair, in okular is easy to annotate a pdf. You just need to activate the annotation mode which is in the top menu under "tools" (idk if it's called that way in english, as I have my system in italian). Also, the shortcut to enable or disable annotation mode is F6. Once activated, you can basically do anything from the bar that appears on the top, I use this a lot, I just wish for it to support the pen pressure of my graphics tablet, but I know that this is some niche use case
I'm actually dreading the Thunderbird UI update, it works fine as it is for me. The last thing I want is everything to get bigger (which seems to be the rule for modern UIs, just make everything harder to do by wasting space) and make seeing if anything has been filtered into my many folders much harder. I have no need for my e-mail across multiple devices though.
I also prefer to avoid DPI scaling, instead I zoom only where I need it so as to maximise my screen space.
Still, as long as any changes are optional instead of forcing me to become less efficient, then I understand that some things do need improving.
Some pet peeves of mine that seem to persist for quite a while.
1. A good two-panel file manager like Total Commander. Krusader is close, but no cigar (yet) and others don't even come close. MC is close in look and feel to what my habits come from, but it's not a GUI app.
2. Handling keyboard layouts. Linux installers often don't let you configure more than one layout at installation time, so if you've chosen Russian as your kbd language and your password was in English, you won't have an option to switch the layout after you first boot into the freshly installed OS. Which means you've locked yourself out of it. Configuring layouts and switching shortcuts is a pain in any DE. Lockscreen language seems to match whatever language you have in the app that is currently active, whereas in Windows it's always your default layout, On top of that, some Linux installations seem to handle modifier keys based on the time you press them. So if you have Ctrl+Shift configured as your layout switching shortcut, and try selecting one word to the left of your cursor (Ctrl+Shift+Left arrow), you'll just move 1 character to the left and switch your layout. Windows handles it no problem. I'm sure this can all be configured somewhere, but it is quite a hassle.
I'm sorry, but webmail is superior for like 90% of society. The reason why there are no good desktop apps is that nobody feels the need for them. Having an email client that you can open from any device, anywhere, without needing to install anything, without needing to wait for any synchronization, just log in and use is a no-brainer for most people.
that's not true. mail apps serve a great purpose specially with notifying and allowing you to view and reply to emails right there and then. Much quicker than opening a browser. Same thing could be said about using google calendar vs an app. It's important and it doesn't suck because there's a lack of need for it. It sucks because the people that linux caters to don't require or care for those programs and features. Developers catering to developers is a big issue in the linux world. So is finding someone capable and willing to design a decent looking and functioning gui app. Gnome photos crashes on start for me on a fresh install of fedora. You have to install the flatpak verison for it to even work and fails out the box. It might not fail for you but you know it's an unstable app. There aren't any photos viewing apps on linux distros which support well implemented trackpad gestures. They either partially support or support in the worst way (unintuitive and unnecessary gestures with poor accuracy and high failure rates). I can't find a video player on linux which allows me to zoom on a video clip while playing the video. Unless you count vlc's implementation as a genuine feature. Trackpad support doesn't exist for those apps either. Can't seek forward and backward or if you can, it's all over the place. There's no accuracy. I guess trackpad's are useless too and trackpad gestures are unnecessary and not required for most people? Then there's poor battery and power management implementation. I suppose laptops don't matter either. You can see the clear pattern and prioritisation of features that developers find useful as opposed to creating well rounded solutions. I'm sure you can find software which counters the arguments I've made in this comment but try to find one which contains all the requirements of a general user even at a low standard. Most linux apps aren't minimal. They're undeveloped and empty.
It seems that I've missed some memo. Can someone please explain what the purpose of pictures of signatures is? I get what a cryptographic signature would do, but a picture of my signature? Does it prove anything if someone could just copy it and paste it somewhere else?
Just to indicate to the person you’re sending the document to that you agree to the terms. You do that all the time in certain businesses
am i only one that is 99% satisfied with Thunderbird for home use? much better than web clients, yes you need to tweak a bit for yourself but all in all it is quite good experience
I don't think you're alone with it. I don't find any issues with adding multiple accounts personally, for example.
There is, aside from the ones you mentioned, one other point for me: having a proper GUI for hardware control. I really hate having to dick around in config files to do stuff like monitor setup, gpu config and tuning, fanspeed control, etc, if it is even possible. I mean, there are some applications for that but as far as I am concerned they all lack features and/or stability. Fan control for example: it shows seven fan headers without explaining which is which and it randomly loses config or misses one header on boot. Or corectrl. Great little GUI to control some aspects of your gpu/cpu but when compared to AMD software it is missing a lot of features.
It's for reasons like these that I just use Google Workspace. All of my stuff is directly or indirectly linked to those apps, and they work together well. On the other hand, even now, with so many developments, linux still feels like something a power user would use.
For example, I wanted to password-protect a folder. How do I do that on my Fedora? I had to go through a learning session just to do that. How nice would it be if there was an option to do that in the "properties" of all directories? Or perhaps a special "secure folder" folder specially for password-protecting files? (This function is available in Google Files mobile app.)
I hate to nag like this, since linux is made through contributions, but I don't have the ability to contribute yet.
Thunderbird has been my preferred email client since it first split off from Seamonkey. So around 20 years at this point and long before I was running Linux full time. If you don't like the layout just change it. Pretty much everything that shows up can be turned on or off and everything can be rearranged and you can load themes to further change the look.
For me biggest pain is lack of office suite that would do the job for me. None of them can handle MS Office formats properly. Vast majority of documents if they are not pdf, they are doc or docx etc. Only office does it pretty well, but it lacked in terms of features last time i checked, and Libre Office is opposite - fully featured, but cant handle ms formats properly.
Sounds like LibreOffice should be copying some code from OnlyOffice, then. What's keeping them? License incompatibilities?
The OnlyOffice developers are doing their best to implement missing features. However, you have to tell the OnlyOffice support which missing features you need.
Your critic about fractional scaling only applies to Gnome and Plasma (just on Wayland with Plasma) since the Wayland architecture resembled the macOS idea to downscale integer resolutions down to fractional resolutions (a mess). Fractional scaling works with Plasma on Xorg (set a custom font DPI + a custom icon size; alternatively the global scaler but this has some other problems). Just recently, Wayland fractional scaling spec was released after years of discussion. We will see true fractional scaling coming to Wayland in the next year.
That’s great, can’t wait to see this new implementation!
2:52 The reason for that is simple. Most Linux devs are on the PDF is only for printing side. Most technical people really hate closed document formats, so if you really want to make a sheet like this, they would tell you to use odt for that.
Yeah, but if someone sends me a PDF to sign, I can’t remake it as an ODT :)
@@TheLinuxEXP That's their point. "PDFs are not for that. You should push odt on them and force everyone to use it."
This is the mentality of the "suckless" devs. They even refuse to use PDF for printing, and just uses Post Script.
@@talkysassis people with that mentality are one of the main reasons why the Linux desktop will likely never be mainstream.
@@sungiant2000 I'm 100% with you on that.
@@talkysassis which is kinda ironic, since it was supposed to be THE portable document format. A format to surpass the others when a document was shared, not to be edited except for forms and fields.
the scaling thing got merged into wayland and hdr is that stage of development where they are testing it (there is an issue/merge request for gamescope but you need custom kernel)
MasterPDF is pretty good at dropping in initials or signatures. Best I’ve found on Linux so far, but paid. A must for work, so worth it for me. Built in support in Gnome and KDE would be amazing though.
1. Editing a PDF is a pita on any platform - simply because the format was never supposed to be editable. Just like it's grandpa Postscript, it was made to ensure that documents look the same on any device - if printed as PDF. So to make changes: Change the original document and reprint / export the PDF. Editing text in a PDF is only useful if you are a prepress company and fix some minor errors in a customers PDF, but then with apps like PitStop Pro by Enfocus.
2. Parental controls are more or less useless on any platform. Either buggy as hell or just unusable. Simple solution: Kids should be supervised anyway when interacting with the bad Internet. Also, DNS filters like OpenDNS work quite well (for young kids).
3. What I really miss is a good replacement for Apple's desktop indexing engine Spotlight.
3:53 You can add a photo of your signature in Okular using stamps in annotation tools
In Romania we have to sign fiscal documents with a qualified digital signature (I used an USB token, so not a drawing) and our government is behind others as there is no special app, we sign directly in a pdf field. Sometimes we also upload documents in the pdf forms, which does not work either on linux. For these I used the Windows that came with the laptop, the free Acrobat Reader can do them all.
For adding a visual signature sometimes I use LibreOffice as it does work well on some pdf files, when it scrues the design (I think it is mostly related to font replacements as they don't fit the page), I use Inkscape for editing the last page needing the signature amd mix them again.
For mixing, extracting pages, alternate mixing (when you scan longer documents written on both sides), rotating etc. I use PDF sam, a paid version.
The pain points you mentioned here, and many others as well, can be boiled down to the lack of money. Many developers and dev teams in the Linux world are not paid, and the Linux community is still too small to be a sufficiently lucrative market. How little money floats around, I am actually amazed how far we've come.
im surprised devs care so little for their own creation they let it wallow in obscurity because they dont have time for even an ugly UI...and that they care so little for the community and linux as a whole that they allow the linux brand to maintain a reputation of CLI hell for decades on end....
@@kazzTrismus I think most devs would love to update the UI or rewrite apps to work better or be more graphical but just can't find the time (or money) to get it done. A full rewrite could take quite some time, time that you normally spend on a job to put food on the table.
So as much as I'd love devs to improve their creations, I totally understand that they sometimes just can't or that it takes a long long time.
@@frankhuurman3955 highschoolers and college students are adding UI's to school projects due in weeks....
if its stuck in CLI it doesnt exist and linux CANT do the thing....its 2022 not 1992 that excuse is old and dead to the normies these days and they dont accept it
@@terrydaktyllus1320 grampy....thats why desktop linux is dead in the water...
this is computing in the modern era...happily admitting linux isnt ready for the modern era of computing should be a point of shame
@@kazzTrismus oh I fully agree that Linux isn't a foolproof system ready for everyday normies to be used, it has way too many issues or missing quality of life improvements for that. Plus I'm 100% on your side that it should be possible to avoid the CLI to make it usable for everyone.
But I also wanted to point out that I had loads of spare time as a high schooler + college student and not so much in the adult working life phase, so feel free to ask these high schoolers and students to work on open source software as well. Perhaps they could improve it for the normies if they have the ability to add a UI to school projects in weeks.
I can do bits and pieces of development in my spare time but not pull several all-nighters to polish the UI for an open source tool I open/use 4 times in a year.
To be fair, I work in IT and a lot of our WIndows users are starting to use OWA instead of the desktop client because it's become a bloated buggy piece of crap.
I do agree with all your complaints but please (as this is the second time after LTT) search and discover the differences between digitally signing a pdf and sign it "handwritten" - it is kind of embarrassing when you complain about this working feature. From my experience - all processes around PDF Forms are more or less broken. It's a pain from the start (design a pdf form - OMG Acrobat), to fill, to save and to automatically process the PDF form. It feels completely messed up from its adobe roots. Maybe this is a reason why nobody wants to put some effort into this topic. The last time I "signed" a pdf, I imported only the page to be signed in Gimp, painted my sign, exported the page as pdf, and put the new page back in the document using pdf-arranger.
I miss being able to search the content of the applications as I can on the Mac using Spotlight. It is true that this technology is in Gnome, however developers do not have the culture of implementing this functionality.
I haven't touched linux in a few years by now but doesn't mailspring support linux? Personally I think it's a good email client app that is elegant and open source despite not providing calendars or contacts
For PDF manipulation, I use ILovePDF that has online version as well as offline app (that is just packed in browser app, but it should work offline). It can also convert from and to other formats (.jpg, .docx, ...). It can do many stuff, it has easy and clear UI. But to be honest, I don't edit PDFs that much and I believe the format is not made for to be edited.
I felt that PDF rant LMAO.
Had similar issues with PDFs too. The most recent one is printing a PDF that has highlights. It gave me solid blocks of colors with the text highlighted not even visible despite the text being visible on the viewer.
If I need to edit PDFs, I use Master PDF Editor 4 for PDF stuff on Linux (get the version 4 and not 5 as 5 needs a license meanwhile 4 can be used full featured with no license). They changed their terms from what I gather that's why it became like that where it suddenly needed a license when upgrading to 5. Tried LibreOffice Draw too but its a mess.
Display scaling specifically fractional scaling gave me problems scaling a 1080p screen by 125% to the point that 1080p TH-cam playback lags. Turned off scaling and just adjusted the font sizes, but that made the UI of some apps not scaling like qBittorrent. Scaling is just a mess be it Windows or Linux, but sadly a worse situation under Linux (on xfce and Cinnamon anyway where I tested).
I haven't tested Master PDF Editor extensively, but it is for certain inferior to the editing features of Adobe Acrobat considering they made the PDF format.
Another addendum. Master PDF Editor 4 (4.3.89 being the last before 5) is available in Qt4 and Qt5 versions in both deb and rpm packages.
Forgot to add this. qBittorrent not scaling in my case is a problem caused by using a GTK desktop Cinnamon for me) with Qt apps like qBittorent. In that specific case Qt 5 Settings (qt5ct) fonts setting fixed that. But in a case like the Strawberry music player the Q t6 equivalent isn't available on Mint 21.1 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) repos.
Well: Out of those things:
PDF signatures: Use your jurisdiction's official specialty app for that please. They might not to be Open Source or intuitive enough to use, but they're official, and publicly recognized as that. If there isn't one; maybe there's an "officious" one out of your bank, insurance system, the military (when applicable) or elsewhere. For basic PDF manipulation: The inbuilt web browser ones or the Office suite ones should be handy enough for that. You won't normally need a specialty app to handle 5,000 PDF's at a time. That's on your bank, state institution, hospital or where applicable!
Email, calendar and the likes: That's "embedded" on the browser. Why would you need to download your emails, once you can to see them at the provider's website platform? Again: Normally you won't need a specialty app to manage 5,000 emails at a time. Your bank, state institution, hospital or elsewhere where applicable will have those!... And distros should stop to provide Thunderbird on the basic installation! It's simply waste of time, space and resources better spent elsewhere!
Display issues: While part of the thing maybe due to bad graphics card compatibility or bad general DE evolution within what's available; there are some tricks that may resolve part of the issues: Enlarge fonts; find more adequate ones; enlarge icons, are on the most common ones. Pretty much all DE's will let you to do so on their definitions app, or you download a tweaks app for that. If you're buying a new computer; please try to read some reviews on the hardware compatibility you're purchasing. There are usually some ones on the most used distros forums or elsewhere.
Automation. The more or the less you want, Linux may provide it; and I'd say; SAFER than everywhere else, because those apps will only touch what you let them to touch. TBHH, that's not a problem for say 99% of the users. Again: Normally you don't need a structure to manage 500 PC's like if it was the same one working! Large entities will have them where applicable. Visual automation for specific tasks may or may not be needed for specific users, and they're popping up on DE's lately. I understand the accessibility for the disabled ones, but those are, by first hand experience, far lower on Linux than on Windows or Mac... And sadly for certain individuals they need to pay separately to have them even on those closed environments. Another story, but that is out of topic here. Badly written apps that won't conform with your OS is another subject that may prevent desired behavior, but those can be found elsewhere, even on Windows! And for the disabled they're a pain on our ... to say the least!
Parent control: Again: What's the system where you can EASILY to create a new user with no administrator privileges nor privileges to call the administrator (basically no sudo or similar access) on said user? Windows is NOT the case; is it?... Even on the closest Windows user you can hijack a virus in less than a second!... Structurally if there is a system safe enough to let the kids to be kids is Linux, and I say it so sadly because basic safety should have been any SO's manufacturing business concern from the beginning!... But it isn't sadly! Again: That Linux has less apps, all of us know. That sometimes we forget to use wisely the resources we have on our hand is also true. So now in 99% of the homes what you need is a good parental control scheme on your browser. If your browser of choice doesn't have your desired level ones, there are tons of apps available, with an advantage on Linux. Install them on the user so that the kid can't change it. And by the way: You won't need your kid to access "that" specific app you use just for your work. Let their workspace to be as simple as possible!
Excuse me if I'm so critical, but again; this is what I think by the most part as an user of pretty much every OS out there. No better nor worse ones. One need to use all of them wisely according to our needs and possibilities!...
And have a nice day!...
IMO, Thunderbird becomes usable if you move the reading pane below the message list and turn on the "Quick Filter Messages" option. These two tweaks get rid of many of the situations you'd otherwise get tabs in or have to deal with a squished-feeling UI.
Yeah, it needs a better flow for some settings, but it's leagues better than it used to be (and has become my preferred email client over Mac Mail and Outlook)
I actually quite like my Thunderbird setup like this.
It is up to personal preferences but personally I keep the message pane turned off entirely and just open emails in tabs. If you need to cross check thing between two or more messages this is fantastic. And if you are reading just one message and want to focus on it that gives you the ability to have most of the screen dedicated to that message.
For me, I prefer to have my emails to open in the full window view - so ive hidden the reading pane and simply double click emails.
For editing PDFs I use pdftk which is a command line tool, which I used to use also on Windows. On Linux, PDFChain is a graphical frontend that allows to use many of the functionalities of pdftk.
While signing a pdf cryptographically is an important feature, there are specialised apps for this. I think that a pdf viewer should offer a handwritten or image signature instead.
For example in Estonia we have eID software called DigiDoc. We can use it to sign pretty much anything with our ID cards. There is no need for this so called "feature" to exist in a pdf viewer, which on top of all is very half baked and requires you to jump through hoops.
Absolutely!
Pretty much similar to what we have here in Portugal. Specialty app for that provided by the state, both for Windows, Mac, and Linux (Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian, Ubuntu) and add-onns for Google Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Oh, well: The browser ones should to work elsewhere. I have never need to use it either.
In Romania we have to sign fiscal documents with a qualified digital signature (I used an USB token, so not a drawing) and our government is behind others as there is no special app, we sign directly in a pdf field. Sometimes we also upload documents in the pdf forms, which does not work either on linux.
you can use the command line tool `pdfsig` to sign and verify pdfs, or you can use `openssl` or `gpgsm` to sign and verify basically any file. I am not sure about the actual implementation of Estonian eIDs, but as long as you have a pkcs11 compatible reader you should be able to interface with your eID from your system, including signing and encrypting email and files with any software supporting pkcs11.
Digital certificates for e-signatures are very important. Copy/pasting an image of the signature does not make it a legally binding and digitally signed e-document in my country. Only specific digital signatures (with those certificates) are a valid form of e-signing.
opposite for many of us
Dropping an image of a real signature is not a digital signature, almost no one *actually* needs a digital signature, we just need to be able to drop in a transparent image onto documents which should seriously be there as an option
Exactly!
In the context of PDFs the word "Signature" is a not so clear defined. It depends on the contract and country what is required. Sometime it could mean a files has to be digital signed. In other Situations only some kind of drawing is required. Okular can also let you draw onto the PDF via the Annotation Toolbar. th-cam.com/video/3FnvBEkcUZE/w-d-xo.html
Similar to the last video. You could have mentioned Xournal++. This is a great tool to draw onto PDFs or use it as a digital paper similar to OneNote.
I do not use a mail client, I still use webmails.
I do not use a calendar, I still use post-its.
I must be older than my age.
Anyway, regarding those, I know that is not necessarily the first soft that comes to mind, but has anyone ever tried those integrated in Vivaldi, to see if they're any decent ?
I think that even bigger problem for linux desktop is lack of not outdated GUI builder for gtk apps.
the best GUI bulder we have is glade, it is still very buggy, only works up to gtk3, feels bad to use.
Nowadays gtk developers not only have to program their applications in C, but design their application interface in FRICKING XML FILES!!!!1!!1
_(yes i know there exists official bindings for python, javascripts, vala, but they all have suboptimal performance, and rust in very hard to use in my experiance)_
Idk if it's just me, but i once was inspired to develop a gtk application, and it was HUGE pain in a butt to work with or to understand how it works.
I think it would be a worthwhile investment to develop a better gtk GUI builder, the one that designers could use to create application interfaces that are actually usable for regular people.
I absolutely agree with your points... there's now Cambalanche, a GTK app prototyping software that seems to be somewhat capable and from what I read, a similar module called 'drafting' will be soon implemented in GNOME Builder. But yeah, GNOME has definitely neglected some of the UX aspects in favor of good UI, but they're making good progress it seems.
Forget GTK, which is also developed by GNOME developers. For example, Canonical has been developing its own apps with Dart/Flutter for some time. Dart/Flutter is modern and available for many platforms.
@@ettoreatalan8303 Dart+Flutter has it's own problems, I never used it tho maybe its good. I like gtk for simple reasons - gnome and it looks good.
@@ade5324 How can you know the problems of Dart/Flutter if you have never used it?
@@ettoreatalan8303 internet forums 🥸
my personal main issue is always just one thing being an issue during the setup process. once something is setup I can completely forget about it, but it can feel so incomplete to get there,
I recently had 2 things, 1 was setting up a server where I had to make sure stuff just mounts on boot and the other is just where to find some customization options in the GUI of my garuda / kde system
I'll never have to touch either of those again for a few years, but each took me much to long to work through compared to the remaining parts of setting up.
For the permanent mount, if I'd had a GUI, there'd be tools, but over CLI this should have also just been an extra parameter when using the mount command instead of an edit of system files.
For the customization ... well really the only thing that could be improved here would actually have been people in forums just shutting up if they have nothing to contribute other then "use the forums search function"... Apparently that's not working well enough. Find a post with a good answer + maybe show how you found it or just directly answer the question.
No matter where else the options would end up, someone would still search for it. And if not for this same thing, something else would have gotten more hidden. 🤷
I would add full install to USB. Witness the large variety of youtube videos, articles and third-party tools to create bootable USB's with persistence. Even the information that full install bootable USB's can be created seems to be hidden in many distros - one of my favorites hides the USB install capability in the "something else" section and seems to default the target drive to my internal Windows hard drive other the only other target USB than the Demo USB being run. Once making it to the install program, many, if not most distros present a large number of options and ask for choices that I don't understand - how about an "option" to install to USB with a suggested best partition structure keeping me from touching my internal hard drive?
I would guess that most new Linux users install first to USB drives - why make it so hard to do full installs to boot USBs. When I finally did manage to get a full install to USB to work with my favorite distro, the USB took 5 minutes to boot and I was glad to finally get it to work. I really didn't know if that was just how things worked, options were available to make my distro boot faster or if I'd done something wrong. With lots and lots and lots of help from the linux community, I did figure out how to get my USB boot drive to boot in a little over a minute instead of 5 minutes.
I'm not sure why my system boots 5 times faster now, but here are my guesses -
1) When installing to a USB, do not have any more drives connected than absolutely necessary - in my case only the source Live Demo USB and the target full install USB - my internal Windows hard drive is physically disconnected for its protection from me and Linux installations) Drives and drive settings /etc/fstab may have an effect on boot time.
(2) The first installation screen seems to vary depending on what is on the target full install boot USB, so I started always formatting the target USB with the USB Stick Formatter menu choice before each installation attempt - this seemed to help get more consistent results.
(3) Apparently the organization of the partitions makes quite a difference - I believe this is where I found most of my faster boot speed - if there is a best choice - why does the installer not suggest it - in my case only two USB drives connected - one I'm running and the target.
As someone who's only ever used Linux as a way to extend the lifespan of an old laptop, I think the reason is that full USB installs are a niche application of an already kinda niche OS -- especially if you're running on hardware with USB 2.0, you're probably gonna get better performance out of installing it on a HDD or SSD anyway. Heck, the only common-ish use I see for a USB disk install of a distro is for something like a Raspberry Pi, where the issue is that the only other option is an SD card, and the read/writes of a daily driver OS can be really bad for them.
@@digitalcalibrator9740 I have to admit that running from a boot USB seems to be rare and almost intentionally made difficult by some distros. For myself, I have 3 windows laptops and I took the oldest slowest laptop which had become almost unusably slow for windows using the internal hard drive and started out booting linux distros from USBs just to find out a little about Linux. While not without a few issues, much to my surprise, my slowest laptop runs plenty fast for me with linux off of a USB drive - laptop even has only USB 2.0.
This led me to changing my perspective on what I want. In the past, I considered the operating system and the associated computer as being magically intertwined. Now, I use any of my dozen or so distro / desktop LInux USB drives piled near my desk on any of my 3 laptops - making the cpu just another tool. The operating system doesn't singularly matter - if for some reason, a drive fails me or I don't like something, I just pick another from my stack - I do keep my data on a separate data only USB drive that I backup regularly.
I do know which laptop I'm running at the moment, but it is not really that important. I'm running the slowest one that is plenty fast for me with Linux with the Windows internal hard drive unplugged to protect it from me and unintentional (default) linux installs. The lid is closed with a big monitor, usb drives, mouse, full size keyboard and speakers or headphones plugged in. I have a set of applications that like which will ideally will run on any distro or at least save files in a common format that can be used, including with Windows.
I agree that pdf editing is a Linux grey area. I use Master PDF editor, which is paid for, but I think it's worth the money; it works well for editing, marking up, adding/removing pages, signing, inserting images, or links to photos or other docs, and is also pretty good on OCR.
Thunderbird works well for me and on Mint XFCE or MX Linux looks good with my setup. Actually I've always used it even 20+ years ago on XP; as they say in Yorkshire "there's nowt so queer as folk".
Nonetheless, Linux is still so much easier to use than MS or Apple's offerings.
I use xournal++ which allows for drawing signature and doesn't screw up the pdf
Nice!
Xournal++ is great! Nick should really give it a try
My issue might be a bit more niche than most.
I'm visually impaired, and while I don't need to use a screen reader, I can't recommend Linux to any of my friends or associates like me that do use them. ORCA seems to be the only option on Linux and it's very rough around the edges in a lot of cases, or just plain won't work in others. The voice that it uses puts a lot of people off as well, and while I've heard rumors of better voices being able to be installed, I have yet to find a decent tutorial on it. Windows has Narrator, NVDA, and JAWS (if you want to pay big money for it), and Mac has Voice Over. I wish Linux could get something equivalent.
I wonder if Valve would bother with HDR on a potential new Steam Deck (if someone can push for it, it would be Valve)
yes, they're looking into an upgraded steam deck (with better screen, battery, etc but same performance)
@@YounesLayachi it is an option it will have HDR but not confirmed. The screen can be better without having HDR.
@@AndersHass sure, I'm just saying the possibility is there
@@YounesLayachi that just wasn't clear. But now it is.
Right now there is literally no way to digitally sign a pdf with a smart card on linux. Using LibreOffice draw does not have the same functions as using adobe acrobat, which allows you to unsign and see other signature properties.
The reason I can't run Linux is because there's no Adobe Photoshop. GIMP does not have any of the AI tools I use all the time, so that's not an option.
Yeah, photoshop is a tough one to replace
Technically you can. I use Photoshop CC 2018 through a specific Wine installation I found online. It works with a few bugs here and there and it allows pen pressure.
@@MastermindAtWork I've been down that route before. It was partially working but it had major problems and I could not get my pen tablet to work with it so I ended up needing to run windows OS on a separate display with KVM. It's broken and slow without a dedicated GPU so I needed to add a separate GPU for the Windows OS. I spent multiple entire days trying to get it all working with KVM integrated into my main desktop. I ended up having problems with graphics drivers. I don't have time to go through all that again. It was a nightmare.
I just had the need to sign a PDF document, and after quite some time of research on the interwebs, someone suggested Xournal to do it. And it works! It can basically insert an image of your signature in any PDF, then you re-export it and voilà: you have a signed PDF. Apparently, it can also add & delete pages, but I didn't see any option to reorder them. Didn't test it for PDF forms though.
Maybe Xournal++ fits your needs for PDF editing. It's more of a note taking app and thus might not be perfect for PDF editing, but it does everything I occasionally need to edit. You can add stuff like textboxes and images to the PDF and there is a pen tool. You can even rearrange the newly placed objects with a select tool.
The biggest thing I noticed was this PDF issue when I started using Windows after having used Linux for years.
An instant pain I had with Linux(specifically Zorin OS Lite 16.2) is when I tried to simulate an install my aunt would do if she was switching from Windows(on Virtualbox 7 on my Acer Aspire 3 laptop running W10 LTSC).
Since there is no MS Office,I got the closest thing in store: WPS Office,through their .deb app in their site.
The problem was with language. WPS doesn't input letters with diacritics(such as é,ô,ã and í,which are pretty common in brazillian portuguese),unless I change the language from the english default(which idk why it was like that since my system was already in PT-BR),but the problem was I could not figure out where the fuck they put the language option on their UI,and when I changed(by downloading a langpack from the AUR's website,and then proceeding to extensively search in XFCE's forums for an hour about why the living fuck Thunar doesn't understand I wanna copypaste a folder from my downloads to /opt/kingsoft/office6/mui,which is the path in WPS for the language packs in case you're wondering),now WPS wasn't only refusing to input the diacritics but also it wasn't recognizing entire letters(with my keyboard properly setup to 105 keys PT-BR no dead keys during the install,which is the default on most laptops here).
And I refuse to use LibreOffice unless they become the damn thing they say they are(a 100% MS Office-compatible suite that is FOSS,which is cap because it's overcomplicated as hell on their settings,and the interface shouldn't take more than a minute to swap from dated Office 2003 to 2013's Ribbon without requiring YT tutorials to show where the exact path is due to how convoluted all this program is),OnlyOffice still hasn't catch up yet,and Softmaker FreeOffice... Let's pretend it didn't happen.
I just want an interface that is cohesive,looks good and allows me to do everything through it. Zorin OS almost does its job,UKUI is pretty close,Deepin perfected it(at the cost of packages availability and performance),but having to do all of this for the program to not work is the reason why I still think Linux needs improvements before we can see ppl migrating to it en masse.
Paragraphs would make this so much more legible but instead was very convoluted to read.
@@riseabove3082 Lemme edit it real quick
The one with the PDF is a really good point. I like the way that Preview handles PDFs on macOS better than anything else on any other platform. Email is actually not that great. I could not find a solution that works as well as MS Outlook or Apple Mail. Another thing is the native desktop apps for Whatsapp and Telegram. I've reduced to using the browser for these. I have browser window with pinned tabs for my different email accounts. It works the best in this situation. It is the reason that I would choose macOS as my daily driver and later on in the coming year. At the moment, I am running FreeBSD with KDE desktop. It is really good and I like the setup I have. I can handle the email. But the PDF, this makes me want to get a macOS system as soon as possible.
I started using Bluemail everywhere. It has less features than thunderbird (I especially miss the advanced search) but works really well and I can have the same setup on my phone and work PC running windows.
All the comments about PDFs, and this is the first email comment. Linux email support is what kept me from using my Pinephone.
actually i never cared about email client, as mostly use web mail anyway even in windows, only place i use desktop mail is outlook on work system, but there i get nearly 1000 mails a day and i need it supper organised to at least keep up...
@@vaisakh_km the filtering in bluemail is great but I don't think it has the performance to handle 1000 mails a day. I remember I heard about a free mass mail organization tool but I can't recall the name.
Okular got so good with time. For some of the things I think you could use masterpdfeditor, has a Flatpak I recon. Gnome apps for mail and calendar look good. Might install them on my KDE rig. Tried to get my outlook account to work once with the KDE apps and as you mention the process was too complex so I didn't bother. I'm a medical student, so I tent to use my PC for productivity a lot. One day went with the Mac KVM rabbit hole and whole and behold I now rock Mac as my productivity OS. Synchronisation with my outlook mail, calendar, to-do/reminder app, man it's wonderful. As much as I like okular, I find myself prefering Adobe's reader as I get all my medical books on PDFs and I highlight and draw a lot on the PDFs. I adore my Fedora KDE install. Prior to installing Mac it was my main OS. What would have sounded impossible a few years back, now is the reality - I rock only Linux on my gaming rig. When I really need to be productive, I find Mac a bit easier. In terms of scaling, I just can't get a nice scale of 125% for my GF's notebook. Maybe ubuntu does it somewhat OK. I am sure we will get there eventually.
Dude! I have the exact same gripes! the pdf thing really shouldn't be this bad. Like you said, the macOS solution is simple and just works. It's great! I don't know anything about coding, but there really should be someone on this.
The PDF problems you pointed are quite an issue. Another issue I have is with Libre Office, the document layout and the way the toolbar is laid out does not look good. Plus, It always shows boxes in Libre Writer around the images, which looks weird for someone coming from MS Office. In terms of overall look and feel, OnlyOffice looks way better, but it lacks feature. Lack of availability of compatible Hardware is another major issue, I have to ask my friend to get a HP Dev One and still waiting for the arrival 🤣.
Oh GOD! You SPOKE MY HEART!! It has been so confusing these truly Linux pains! Seriously it makes it so difficult to fully switch to Linux. I have been using iCloud web, just because Thunderbird... well... sucks! PDF! ah... you said everything about it. Calendar and contacts.... awch!
Inkscape and Scribus both can edit PDFs as long as they aren't too large (in which case, both will crash). Also, Evolution is great at contacts and calendaring. It supports CardDAV, CalDAV and Exchange, and Google for contacts and calendaring. It's still part of GNOME.
Another pain point for me is the interoperability of Linux. Sure Linux can mount pretty much all drives no matter of how they are formated, but Windows and Mac just do not. Of course you can format your drive to something else in advance. When you are at a different system, plug your USB drive in and the drive does not show up, Captain Hindsight won't help if the USB is formated in eg. ext4.
So Linux is a good toolbox, but it still turns into a bit of a one way street that it's harder to move away from.
My two big pain points are: Sane defaults. Things like click to open, app store search defaults, no minimize/maximize, no tap to click on touchpads, etc. Other one is no sudo functionality on many graphical apps. Windows equivalent would be right-clicking as administrator. My password is what is supposed to protect my system files, not the developer thinking I'm too stupid to save a config file because I'm using the GUI text editor.
Considering most users are just wanting a basic email and browser experience, access to write a doc or view video.
I think Linux is great value ‘free’ product, for the average daily drive, depending on the flavour you choose.
Oh yeah, it’s fantastic! These are just things I need, but that doesn’t mean everyone does!
I use Evolution with Exchange server and it works. Calendar, mail, tasks, notes and contacts.
Thanks everyone for suggesting solutions to these problems in the comments. After switching from Windows to Linux about 6 months ago I've definitely run into some of these problems so it's really helpful hearing about the tools you've used to get around them.
Of your points the ones that affect me most (I'm one of the old people that use webmail - I used to use Thunderbird but decided offline storage in my ISP of emails was safer for me, so I use their webmail) are the PDF thing and the fonts thing. For editing PDFs I use LibreOffice and just put up with the inconvenience, so I'd like to see a better app for concatenating PDFs, moving pages around and adding/deleteing/editing PDFs that has some smarts to allow the "flow" of the text to be taken into account. This could probably be done by improving the PDF import in LibreOffice. although there would still be the problem of affecting the layout which may or may not be a problem, depending on what you are trying to do.
As for fonts, I find some applications seem to use default fonts that are tiny, with no way to change the fonts because they ara using defait fonts, and possibly were developed for a different window manager and don't pick up the right font sizes or something like that. On occasions I've found ways of setting environment variables in launchers to fix these problems, but I shouldn't have to. Perhaps window managers should set these variables for applications looking for them when the fonts are set in their setup apps, at least for the major window managers like KDE, MATE, CINNAMON etc. The app that is worse for this for me is KiCAD, but Prusaslicer has some aggegiously small fonts too on my computer, to the extent I have to change glasses to read them. Probably not a problem for young people like yourself!
One of the biggest problems with email in a corporate context is compatability with corporate email systems. Evolution has some support for Outlook, maybe its better these days with Microsoft showing more of an interest in Linux, but it really needs to get to the point where changes to the Windows client and the Linux clients come at roughly the same time for organisations to want to use Linux as a client platform. I can't see this happening unless Microsoft loses interest in monetising client licences and moves the cost to the server software. Personally I am not bothered too much by the "UX experience" on Evolution as long as it is functional and not arcance, but I understand the look is a concern for some and no company really wants to be using really old fashioned looking software even if it is excellent "under the hood".
I've not really thought about the automation aspect, but then before I retired my job was writing scripts to automate business processes, so I've never had to think about the need for people less experienced on the command line (which lets face it, is most users and those we need to attract to Linux) in this regard. It does seem to me it need not be all that hard to develop a graphcal "script builder" along the lines of scratch that responds to system events or monitors parts of the file system and performs a series of simple actions. many graphical applications have a command-line interface that allows certain actions, and they could install action definitions into the graphical automation application. What really is needed to start is for a small group of interested parties to define the file and data structures required and start a discussion so that other projects have something to refer to and we don't end up in traditional style with an array of competing API's and applications that can't be made to interact properly or implement easily.