Huh? How did you narrow it down to just GIMP? Are you excluding all non-GUI software or something? GUI has never been a big focus for GNU (which I assume is what you’re referring to when you say FSF), though they do have a couple of projects like GIMP and GNUCash. Most notably as far as GUI is concerned, they instigated the GNOME project, though they later split off. But yeah, they still maintain extremely important tools, especially for developers and UNIX systems, such as glibc, coreutils, gcc, emacs, gdb, make, bash, grub, octave, guix, etc.

Yeah. xwayland isn’t gonna die ever probably, so there’s no rush.

like most apps on Linux, kde connect was never exclusive to any desktop. you don’t need gsconnect.

At the moment, we have Blink (Chrome), Gecko (Firefox), Webkit (Safari), Servo, Ladybird and Goanna (Pale Moon).

At best, another Pale Moon is what would happen. They’ve been maintaining their own hard fork of Gecko by themselves since 2016. They clearly have people capable of maintaining a browser engine, though perhaps not quite enough of them. If Firefox were to die, perhaps joining up with Goanna would be the smart move.

There are significantly fewer Firefox-based browsers than there are Chromium-based ones, unfortunately. Out of the ones we do have:

Floorp has much like Vivaldi gone the proprietary source-available route, so you couldn’t pay me to use it.

Pale Moon is easily the most involved of the Firefox forks, being a fork of a much older version of Firefox, but I wouldn’t generally recommend it for security reasons. It does have its uses, though. Waterfox Classic is in a somewhat similar boat. Security-wise Pale Moon is definitely the better of the two because it uses its own fork of Gecko which is maintained about as well as you could reasonably expect given the manpower available to the project. Waterfox Classic meanwhile has kinda just been left to rot since most development is going to regular Waterfox nowadays, so it’s not maintained nearly as well as Pale Moon and it’s just been collecting CVEs. But for those same reasons if all you want is the ability to use legacy XUL extensions, then Waterfox Classic is gonna have better compatibility since it hasn’t been modified nearly as heavily as Pale Moon.

LibreWolf is probably the most popular Firefox fork nowadays, but it isn’t much more than a Firefox equivalent to Ungoogled Chromium. Waterfox goes a little further, but not by much. Both can be good choices, but personally I haven’t had much reason to switch away from upstream Firefox. LibreWolf is tempting, but I can already disable pretty much all of the Firefox BS from about:config, so I don’t see the point. It’s pretty much just better defaults.

It is significantly less powerful when compared to LibreOffice, lacking support for many features. It offers less applications than LibreOffice. It is significantly less customizable than LibreOffice. It’s built on bloated web tech. It lacks RTL support.

I am not paranoid about OnlyOffice’s origin. I also do not think it is the best office suite on Linux by a mile.

The Steam Deck works well if you have a particularly twisted definition of “working well”. SteamOS is certainly among the worst Linux distros I’ve used. It is certainly significantly worse than the average desktop-oriented distro. Sure, Valve has done good work with Proton, but basically every other piece of their stack is broken in some way.

Just a couple of days ago I had an issue where after the battery died and I plugged my Steam Deck into the charger, it simply failed to turn on. The fans would start spinning and that’s it. Nothing else worked. I could not get into the BIOS menu. I could not get into the recovery menu. The solution? Unplug the Deck, let the battery die from spinning fans and plug it back in, hoping that time it’ll turn on. Spinning fans take a long time to drain the battery, so this took me a couple of hours even though I’d only been plugged in for about ten minutes. I am not the first to deal with this issue. You can see posts online about it more than a year old. Those posts are how I was even able to figure out the solution.

I will never understand why SteamOS gets any kind of praise. This kind of issue is unacceptable. Any non-tech-savvy user will assume their device got bricked. I’ve seen several people mention they did RMA over this. And despite being a critical failure known for over a year, it hasn’t been fixed.

If you’re not a techy, SteamOS is garbage. It is ridiculously unpolished and keeps breaking in ways that can be difficult to fix. Every update (especially the client updates) has a 50/50 chance of breaking something, even on the stable update channel. You have to switch to desktop mode just to use a web browser. In fact, you have the switch to desktop mode for a lot of things, because gaming mode doesn’t let you do things like adding non-Steam games, install Flatpak applications or use a file manager. But desktop mode is entirely unsuited for gamepad controls and the on-screen keyboard feels particularly sluggish (though it can also get sluggish in gaming mode, just not as often).

If you’re a techy, SteamOS is also garbage. It is still ridiculously unpolished and the immutability is implemented in such a way that completely neuters the whole OS as anything you change gets wiped on every update (you can’t layer). There are hacks to do most things from gaming mode. You can run Firefox with some kind of weird setup where you run it inside a nested KWin session, because Gamescope is completely incapable of handling multiple windows, which would normally break all of the context menus and the hamburger menu in Firefox. Similar deal with Dolphin for file management. You can even run the entire Plasma desktop nested inside Gamescope, albeit with some caveats. Still need to switch to Desktop Mode to add non-Steam games tho, since you can’t run the desktop Steam Client from Nested Desktop. Things break occasionally, but it’s manageable. Figuring out all of these workarounds is quite time consuming though. This would not be the case if SteamOS was actually a good distro.

Would need a decent port of JDK to RISC-V.

FileZilla.

Is there any reason you need to switch other than the age of the last releases? Avidemux had its last release in 2022 and its last commit a week ago. For a piece of software with a fairly stable and unchanging set of features, that seems pretty reasonable to me. Avidemux still works fine on Linux and is still packaged by all of the large Linux distros, so I don’t see the problem. VirtualDub’s definitely dead, though.

IIRC the Krita people were working on redoing the text tool. Not sure if/when it’s going to be finished, though.

Holy shit, will people ever shut up about the name? The truth is that barely anyone actually gives a shit except FOSS zealots trying to come up with excuses for why GIMP wasn’t successful (or those belonging to the anti-GIMP circlejerk that’s surfaced as of late trying to come up with new nonsensical reasons to hate a random piece of FOSS). Outside of the English-speaking world, the amount of people who give a shit about GIMP’s name is precisely zero and the word gimp is almost exclusively associated with the program. Even inside of the English-speaking world, I see GIMP used to refer to the program more often than for anything else. The amount of people actually who actually care about the name is negligible and the amount of brand recognition that would be lost from a rename would significantly outweigh the benefits of possibly having a couple more schools think about maybe starting to use GIMP.

And the truth is that as far as FOSS GUI programs are concerned, GIMP has been tremendously successful. It’s easily among the most popular, alongside Blender, Firefox and LibreOffice. It is and always has been far more popular than Krita in both professional and non-professional contexts. I’ve seen it installed on the computers of both my secondary school and college, because it turns out school computer labs need image editors and they’re not going to pay for Photoshop licenses.

But it hasn’t been more successful than Photoshop. And Firefox hasn’t been more successful than Chrome. And LibreOffice hasn’t been more successful than MS Office. And Blender hasn’t been more successful than Maya. And Godot hasn’t been more successful than Unity. And I could go on. Because no single FOSS GUI program has achieved industry standard status. Though Blender has a pretty good shot at making it.

Why would Adobe do literally anything about CS6 in the year 2024 when they discontinued in 2013?

Nah, a ton of Linux fans seem to shill hard for Apple for some reason.

Oh boy, Davinci? Don’t hold your breath, it’s super picky even with the more mature GPU drivers.

Content blockers like uBlock use filter lists which list every single element that needs to be blocked across the entire web. I currently have nearly 700000 of these filters active. That is very far outside the scope of a simple script. Basically all ad blocking userscripts are site-specific and they still usually block significantly less than uBlock would on the same site. Also, userscripts are not safer than extensions.

Most AUR packages that aren’t postfixed with “-bin” are compiled on your system. Most distro packages have AUR counterparts, but they’re usually git builds, so using them for every package you can will probably just break your system.

It’s not an unpopular opinion that Apple is the only one that does sleep right. It is an unpopular opinion that this is only possible because they have a complete walled garden and that open platforms are fucked, especially considering it is easy and common to install applications from outside the App Store on macOS. We used to have sleep figured out, that’s what S3 was. But then hardware vendors dropped it. So yes, drivers and hardware vendors are part of the problem. The Steam Deck is an example of an open platform where sleep works fine.

What, the grey bars? Crappy is a rude way of putting it, but yes they look pretty bad. I think that’s probably an artifact from the Qt4 days. It looked fine with Oxygen. Rest looks fine to me. If you think it looks busy, well the screenshot has a lot of panels enabled, just to showcase the features. IIRC many of them are not shown by default and a user would only keep the ones they need, since the interface is customizable.