I just can't stand using Windows as OS anymore - Microsoft has gone to far - where is the PhotoLab for Linux?

DxO PhotoLab
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So what? What is the average non-tech-savvie computer user meant to do with all this “open” source?

Imagine I am a 71 year old woman who has finally decided to pack up her analogue darkroom and switch to digital. I have no previous experience of using computers, only using my phone for emails and web browsing.

All I want to do is to turn on the computer and start using PhotoLab, which was recommended by a friend, who is going to help me find out how to replace my darkroom knowledge with a piece of software.

Why should I care whether the app (PL) is open source or not? What difference does it make to how the app works?

Since all I want to do is to start the computer and use one app, what difference does that make?

Well, it doesn’t and may never so do. So, as they say, suck it up and move on.

How about Open Office, whose documents I have sometimes been sent, only to find I can’t easily read them or edit them?

But, if that is all I need, why go to all that time and trouble learning something that less than 1% of the world’s photographing population knows about?

And you will be welcome. Just let the Linux subject go. As I and others have already said, it simply ain’t going to happen, especially if you don’t contact DxO directly.. All you are doing here is is annoying those of us who don’t give a hoot.

Congratulations. You have found your Nirvana. Now, please go away until you have questions about DxO products for Windows or Mac.

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I haven’t said you should, yet you continue to denigrate anything that isn’t macOS and PhotoLab.

Sorry, but I’m not one of those asking for PhotoLab on Linux. I also don’t think it will ever happen.

Thanks, but I’ll post here when I want, as long as DxO allows it, it’s as much my forum as yours. If you don’t like threads like this then I suggest you stop commenting.

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Joanna, I did not say “move”. I said, I would like to “move”.

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No-one said it was. Just that part of it is. Unlike in Linux land, the whole stack is developed by one company.

It’s actually more than 100% open source because, like all good standards, there are so many to choose from.

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And those who don’t like (particularly) @Joanna and I taking potshots at Linux. It’s probably because of all the potshots being taken at Windows and Mac.

Everyone is denigrating what they don’t like.

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@zkarj @Joanna , It’s not about badmouthing anything. We discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the different operating systems with regard to photography and, in particular, DxO PL. In the past, I had already migrated almost 100% to Linux, but the last stumbling block was (and still is) DxO PL. DxO is the only reason why I still work with MS WIN (or have to work with it). I also realize that DxO will never develop a pure Linux version in addition to the existing versions. The way forward will be to find a way to run DxO PL for WIN or MAC under Linux, with all its current and future features. The approach with WINE is already quite good, but it doesn’t work completely (yet). I feel that this discussion is being held in the wrong forum. Wouldn’t it be better suited to a Linux forum?

Regards HGF

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Yes, a “DxO on Linux” forum is an excellent idea.

I personally am tiring of being accused here of living in a “bubble” because I use a Mac for my editing and find Apple products more easily maintained than its competitors. I suppose because I enjoy my Toyota RAV hybrid which has given me five years of zero issues, just driving excellence, that I’m living in a “Toyota walled-garden”.

I came here to learn tips and tricks, monitor software updates, etc., so I can better edit my photos. A Linux forum here - make it so!

Namaste

Here’s a peace offering, an old Tri-X 35mm image of mine from the early 70s that DxO helped move closer to my pre visualization.

2026-01-24-0015_9
2026-01-24-0015_91920×1307 234 KB

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Banks are an especially poor dip stick since “AI” is just about to lay of a lot of bank employees.

… and there is at least one thing I wonder about when it comes to this discussion about Windows and promotion stuff and Microsoft´s own periferal systems like their cloud storage e.t.c. I just can´t understand why there is no problem for Linux-people to configure their own Linux-environment to their liking when they seem totally paralyzed when it comes to configuring Windows. Either your different Linux variants or Windows suits all as is by default.

I don’t understand how it is that Linux users who have no problem “picking together” their own Linux environment would be so completely incapable of doing the same with Windows. It looks more like a total learned bottomless helplessness to me. Of course, you can configure Windows so that you don’t have to deal with a lot of advertising and other annoying things if you want to and have the knowledge. We’re not comparing a Linux professional with a Windows novice here, are we??

Start by configuring a new LOCAL Windows login ID, and you’ll be rid of basically all the Microsoft hassle that you don’t want to be exposed to. I did just this on two machines that my grandchildren got for Christmas and it works perfectly. I’ve been running it myself for so long and I don’t have any problems of the type that you seem to be bothered by.

If you’ve done that, the problem isn’t the operating system, but just like with all other operating systems - not least on your phones - there are many applications that cause it. You seem to have completely missed the small detail as you are as usual completely staring blindly at the operating systems.

Today I tried to replace my Android Messenger and it only took a good while because they were deliberately mined with the Chinese TEMU applications and all sorts of other shit.

The only thing we can never know is what the manufacturers of the operating systems collect but it doesn’t stop there. I assume you don’t claim that there shouldn’t be applications under Linux that are “spyware”? I myself have a backup program “EaseUS” that is made in China and if anything it should be a perfect front but they are so welcome because if I can distract The Communist Party of China from making up a lot of crap with my completely meaningless data for them then I have done the world a real service.

It offers cloud storage but it’s not something I use - not because I’m worried that they would learn Swedish and secretly read my files but because the performance is just too poor. It just doesn’t work for me to rely on EaseUS cloud storage for a Restore.

It’s no wonder that Linux has been adopted by both the Chinese and Indians because they haven’t been able to afford to pay for the software they use for a long time. So all that altruistic development work is a perfect fit for a user base in China that has never cared about intellectual property rights. They’ve learned that lots of Linux-enthusiastic altruists love to work for them for free, so why should they care about Windows at all?

… and it is not at all about Windows, Linux. Macs or other oerating systems today. The real question is there shall be any of these and not just a rudimentary thin OS just enough to surf the web. Especially when it comes to running bigger AI-models locally it very quickly gets very expensive and then the only alternative is the big cloud-services that can be used even with thin clients.

What is happening now is that many presumptive PC-buyers are priced out of the desktop and laptop PC markets because really quickly pretty dramatically price lifts. The tailormade computer i bought for 3000 U$ a couple of month ago has got around 500 U$ more expensive in just two months.

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Do we need 88 messages to say that we want DxO on Linux, which is perfectly justified, and to answer that it is unlikely, which is equally justified?

Two or three messages should be enough and then we stop.

There is a lot to know about this forum and even more noise: the signal-to-noise ratio is not good!

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Normally it works fine but there is still problems especially in countries where we use characters outside the old ASCII of legacy reasons (old databases etc) I have told you before that I have experiences from several organizations where the Mac-characterset has fucked up Digital Asset Management-systems so bad that there automated workflows of pictures stopped working. Unicode is good but not all legacy-systems we need to handle is configured to use them.

Out Swedish Å, Ä, Ö, å, ä, ö doesn´t look much for the world but they have fucked up lots of workflows historically in intenational environments. I once built the integration of the product-info and pricing management in the biggest Nordic distributor of the nineties integrating databases from Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark - all using their own sets of these characters and besides that we also have different formats for Date and Time. It is historic since we have never been able to standardize sinced we allö think we are sooo special.

We had the same problem in the City Museum of Stockholm despite that DAM was just Swedish but since especially the photographers insisted in using Macs despite Stockholm had standardized on Windows for their 30 000 computers. We were one of the few organisations of the City that faced these problems because our FotoWare DAM DID NOT LIKE some of the Mac-characters.

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You don’t need to tell me about character set woes. I’ve seen many with my own eyes. But they are the fault of the old systems, not new ones. It’s not so much that Macs messed up the database rather the database didn’t cope with anything but an assumption it would always be Windows.

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For those who don´t know how to configure a Windows PC with just a Local Windows Account:

Just using a single LOCAL USER ACCOUNT with Admin-rights will stop all communication with the Microsoft-Cloud including backups, leaking clipboard history, mirroring of personal folders and the otherwise mandatory One Drive-storage

https://youtu.be/Z7cfX_58HuE

“Windows 11 Is Recording Everything You Copy (Turn This Off)”

A tip on how to turn off things in Windows 11 that leaks data to the cloud even if you haven’t configured a Local User Accoungt yet.

https://youtu.be/R9I1X-Dy9ck

When it comes to Microsoft imposing totally uneccessary incompatibility issues for Windows 10 users upgrading ti Windows 11 I´m all in into the protests BUT I just don´t buy this crying over Windows-integrity problems that are really easy to fix if you have the slightest knowledge about Windows and that Linux-techguys also are there in that discontent-choir is just embarrassing for them I think. For them this ought to be a non-issue because I guess they arer used to solve far more complicated things mastering their Linux command line interfaces. We need to do that in Windows too from time to time but it is NOT the case in these examples.

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No not in the last case. The problems occured when dumping pictures with metadata added by Macs and in the corporate world the need is almost mandatory to be able to integrate even older legacy databases. In this museums case that system is still in use 2026 13 years after it was officially taken into service.

The problem with Macs isn´t the character-set itself as long as it lives in a strictly Mac-standardized environment but it is not the way the IT-world looks like today. There is almost always data exchange going on between Macs and Windows-machines sinced IT IS NOT the Mac-platform that is the industry standard but the Windows one.

The are some photo-centric bubbles where Macs are the standard but that is just som exceptions confirming the rule. Some newspapers and some companies in the music industry.

I don´t know what character set Linux uses and by the way - talking about IBM- we also had to handle IBM i-Series DB2-data in EBCDIC in that Nordic example above where even some Windows terminal software were used. That data was also replicated to a DataWareHouse for business analyzes where it lived together with som other data from Windows SQL Server-databases. Adding Macs into that environment too might have been to push our luck too far. To keep it simple is still a very good rule.

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LOL. Windows an “industry standard”. Doesn’t mean it’s good or right.

anyway, this thread has gone on way too long.

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Did I say or imply that everyone should jump to accommodate Linux users? I took myself, using the gravitational pull metaphor, merely to be saying it’s on the distant horizon. Linux uptake is accelerating and what you’re saying about Linux seems to be behind the times. Your characterizing my tentative poking of the bush in this regard as “please, please, please stop screaming at the good folks in this user forum…” what on earth is that?! Did I disturb a puff adder?

And I’m not arguing with you about the virtues of Apple products. Neither is it appropriate for me to get into explaining how I ended up being a sorry Windows user.

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No and as I have said numerous times: The OS is nothing but the applications running on it is what matters and there are so many industry applications running on nothing else than Windows. That is still a fact. It has very little to do with Windows properties really and as I also has written: professional IT-people know how to configure even Windows-environments since many years back to create stable and efficient conditions for their users. The problem that private users often face is that they lack that experience and knowledge needed to get their software to work properly as intended.

It is also a fact that very few are using Photolab 9 as a RAW-converter. Photolab is not an industru standard application - Lightroom is. Photolab is really more of a niche product mainly attracting enthusiasts, so I can understand the interest it awakens among some Linix-people.

The problems with for example AI-masking in Photolab exposed here at DXO Forums is unknown with both Lightroom and Capture One because theit AI-models are far better optimized than the ones in Photolab 9. So people hanging here complaining about the hard fate as Photolab users is probably a very marginal group. I don´t even know if it is representative for Photolab users since the users that has invested in better machines seems to have had far less problems than the rest.

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@Stenis

I very much like your post and I agree with almost everything.

But aren’t there differences between Windows 11 in the USA and Windows 11 in the EU?
The mentioned “..Recording Everything..” (the YouTube link) is turn off on my computer (in Germany) by default. Shouldn’t that be the same in Sweden?

I think (believe, hope) that In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows 11 functions differently than it does in the USA due to two major regulations: the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Do you have any insights into that?

Your speech about “standards” absolutly right. MacOS is so underrepresentated (at least outside the US) that it is actually irrelevant. Linux is even rarer.

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Yes, that might be the case. Some things ON in the US versions are not BUT you are still forced into Microsoft Login in all sorts of ways and you also get rigged with the cloud storage and are set for invoicing for uswed storage exceeding the default limit. There is also a great number of choices they walk you through where ther is an active choice to turn things of and things not everybody understands. You are also set for backup (synchronization) of certain folders which has caused people problems too.

The only way to get rid of it all (including the communication with OneDrive) is to install using a Local Account but the default isn´t Local but Windows.

In Sweden of some reasons iPhones has about 70% market share which is way more than internationally which is 18%. Android has 45.5% of the OS market totally. If we take away the phones and concentrate on the computer OS´s than all Windows versions has 77% togethwer today. Apple Mac OS has 13%. Linux 4% but it is not even third because Google Chrome OS is with 4,5%!

Here is more to come. What I wonder is what Google is up to right now. Today the most used OS on the net is Android with 45,5%. It is used in phones and pads. There is a rumor and some writing on the net that we might see a new Google Aluminium OS targeting laptop and desktop computers in 2026. If that happens I guess the Linux community gets even more marginalised on PC:s and even Apple will get into real troubles.

There are signs that Google is about to move forward in the AI-race. No other has their data and if they can overthrow Microsofts hegemony on the computer market they might even hit Open AI hard that is tied to Microsoft when it comes to AI (Copilot).

We can just add 45.5 (Android on phones and tablets) and Google Chrome on 4,5% more and already there we have 50%. Chromebook is already bigger than Linux on PC´s despite no one even seems to mention it of some reason - everybody here just talk about Linux which is a fly fart in the whole.

If Google really manages to come with something exceptional with the Aluminium OS (and I thinkj they will) we shall not forget that they not just comes integrated with Google Gemini AI and Nano Banana and the whole Google AI Platform, Google Maps and all sorts of Android applicationsfrom the whole world. They even already have a complete Office solution on the net at Google Drive integrated with both filestorage and Google Mail. It is almost fully compatible with Microsoft Office and I have used it a couple of years in parallell with MS Office without any bigger problems. It works with just a few minor flows (mostly textformatting) iyt even can read MS Office Project files!

If Google Aluminium becomes a hit Linux will get totally irrelevant for everyone but the hard core Linux-zealots and it doesn´t even need Microsoft levels to do that because it will be a full blown alternative to Microsoft and more in almost every possible way except on the servers - yet. Google is in a tremendously strong position already. I wonder how the American competition authorities will look at this when it happens. In the nineties they were pretty close to split Microsoft of the same reasons into two different companies - one for the OS and one for the applications.

In this context, Linux on PCs is most likely to cement as a utterly marginal special interest for a very limited group of users. People stuck in that swamp or technical backwater might miss it all when Google really takes off. This might very well be the next big paradign shift in the computer world as we knew it. From what I have seen on Youtube Linus Thorwalds hasn´t been all that AI interested and he litterally gave Nvidia “the finger”. That finger was not pinting towards an AI-complianyt future for Linix.

I said even Apple has to look up because if this Google PC-OS really takes off and becoms a real MS Windows alternative I´m not all that sure that many software companies would chose Mac over Google. Maintaining applications for more than two OS´s few will see any economy in.

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…. and what about this: Huawei Harmony OS.

Where will the installed base of Linux in China go when this happens widely.
We can argue that this is China and not the west BUT still who in China will continue to use Linux on PC´s?

… and what will happen to Mac- and iPhone-sales in China when Huawei-phone and Huawei PC´s get seamlessly integrated??

If we listen to this video we also realizes that it is not just in the west and US that people are worried about companies from other countyries monitoring the locals data. Are we surprised it works both ways??

Is there still people here that believe Linux is the future we all have waited for???

Doesn´t it look like both Google and Huawei are building their new OS´s with AI from the bottom up and that Linus Thorwalds that used to give the finger to both AI and Nvidia seems to have other preferences. … and whatabout Apple where are they in this new brave AI-world. Well I guess we all can say Linus Thorwalds might have turned to a Linux mascot and that itis the whole Linux-collective and not Thorwalds that determines the fate of Linux.but for me this doesn´t at all look all that good for the Linux future.

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Slowly, slowly. Teaming up with Google with a layer of privacy on top.