People downvoting you but Linux seriously lacks contenders to those apps (especially if you’re a power user). I’ve used Gimp alongside Photoshop for the past decade and while Gimp excels in a few areas (color to alpha is crazy useful) it’s so poorly designed, it blows my mind. Alpha channel still disabled by default on a layer!?
I use a KVM to switch between Linux, macOS, and Windows every day and it pains me I still can’t switch to Linux full time unless I give up on a tools like Photoshop (Excel however is fast being replaced by Pandas / Polars).
I’m holding out hope that a byproduct of Valve and Codeweaver’s efforts with Proton might mean Photoshop will one day run perfectly on Linux. I hate Adobe but Photoshop doesn’t have a serious contender (and given how asinine the .psd format is, we’ll never see a decent tool support its file format fully either).
Yeah I was a bit surprised by the downvotes considering this is the windows community, but then again the Linux fanboys on Lemmy are a resilient bunch.
Funny thing is that I’m using Linux (Xubuntu) as my daily driver, but switch to Windows for those two applications pretty much exclusively.
I’ve yet to use Pandas / Polars, are they working well with macros/vbs and pivot tables, especially importing existing ones from excel? That was by biggest pain point with Calc.
Pandas and Polars are libraries for the Python and Rust programming languages (respectively).
The way I moved on from Excel was to write code instead since my end goal was always data visualization and there are so many good visualization libraries that offer far more than Excel could out of the box.
It’s not for the faint of heart and you’ll have to reimplement the logic of all your macros but once you’re liberated, it’s exceptionally freeing - especially being able to handle vastly bigger datasets than Excel could handle.
Ah ok, understood. Unfortunately I’m not much of a programmer, I understand just enough of the syntax from macros to use them and make slight adjustments, not to rebuild them from scratch. So I somewhat rely on the tools that some with excel or have been developed in my company.
I feel like there’s just some techies who consider these applications essential to their whole life and being, while most others have not much use for them.
In this case, I agree that the downvotes are undeserved, because they only talked about their own needs.
But yeah, my gut reaction was to get angry, too, due to association with some jackasses who will vehemently argue that Linux as a whole is not useful (not even for decidedly non-power-users), because clearly everyone unquestionably needs Photoshop and Excel.
